A CENTRAL ITALIAN ALBARELLO

CIRCA 1550

Details

A CENTRAL ITALIAN ALBARELLO
Circa 1550
Of cylindrical form, painted alla porcellana in blue and white and enriched with green, yellow and ochre, the shoulder, upper body and foot with various incised geometric patterns of leaf tips, triangles, dashes, cross-hatches and beads, labelled for NVCE COCE
10in. (26cm.) high

Provenance

With Cyril Humphris, London
The Arthur M. Sackler Collections, no. 79.5.5

Exhibited

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Sixteenth-Century Italian Maiolica from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection and from the National Gallery of Art's Widener Collection, 5 September 1982 - 2 January 1983, no. 3
San Francisco, CA, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Palace of the Legion of Honor, Italian Maiolica from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections, 5 July 1986-1988, no. 17

Lot Essay

This albarello is part of a significant group - all of the same shape, all with alla porcellana colorata decoration in a distinctive style separated by vertical zones and with consistent incised formal patterns on the blue bands around the shoulder and foot. For a discussion of this class of ware, see Carda Fiocco and Gabriella Gherardi, "Alcune considerazioni sull'Orsini-Colonna, il servizio Bo, il servizion T e la 'porcellana colorata'". Faenza, anno LXXVIII, pp. 157-166 tavola XXIII-XXXI, where the authors point out that the shape is inconsistent with the traditional Faventine albarello and suggest Castelli as a potential source. It is perhaps relevant to this last suggestion that similar incised geometric decoration occurs on pieces of Orsini-Colonna type such as the previous lot.

Sold with thermoluminescence certificate 381r23 dated December 1985 from the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, Oxford University, stating that the sample tested was last fired between 330 and 510 years ago (1475-1655).