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Lot Essay
The 'Justice of Trajan' is a legendary episode in the life of Roman Emperor Trajan (53 AD - 117 AD), based upon the story told in the early medieval lives of St. Gregory. According to the story, Trajan, busy with preparations for the Dacian Wars, stopped his army in order to see justice done to a poor widow whose son had been killed. As he had been so just St. Gregory the Great prayed for his redemption from Hell. The episode is refered to in Dante's Purgatorio where Trajan appears on a marble carving described by Dante in book X, 74-84.
A dish painted by Nicola da Urbino with a different version of the same subject is illustrated by Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, London, 2009, pp.234-235, no. 144. Another armorial example, formerly at Cliveden, is in the Thompson Collection, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and a third in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum is illustrated by Johanna Lessmann, Italienische Majolika, Brunswick, 1979, p. 177, no. 153, again of differing composition to the present lot.
A dish painted by Nicola da Urbino with a different version of the same subject is illustrated by Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, London, 2009, pp.234-235, no. 144. Another armorial example, formerly at Cliveden, is in the Thompson Collection, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and a third in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum is illustrated by Johanna Lessmann, Italienische Majolika, Brunswick, 1979, p. 177, no. 153, again of differing composition to the present lot.