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Lot Essay
This elaborately decorated plate representing the month of June can, on stylistic grounds, be attributed to the enameller Jean Miette who was apprenticed to Léonard Limosin in the mid 16th century. A number of very similar enamelled vessels, characterised by a deep blue ground juxtaposed with grisaille figures and decorated with tightly packed foliate scrolls, have been attributed to him due to their similarity to a tazza in the British Museum, London, bearing the initials 'I.M.' (Caroselli, op. cit., p. 150). The largest group of enamels now attributed to him are in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and two plates in particular, of the month of April and The Banquet of Psyche (Baratte, loc. cit.), demonstrate near identical facial types and drapery as well as identical clouds and gilded sky. The Month of April plate is particularly interesting as it is decorated to the reverse with a nearly identical scene of a deity, in this case Minerva, framed by a renaissance architectural scheme and embellished with grotesque masks and foliate scrolls. In terms of quality perhaps only the Sacrifice of Isaac plate in the Los Angeles County Museum (Caroselli, loc. cit.) compares to the quality of the plate offered here. As Caroselli points out in her entry on that piece, Miette's earlier style, as seen in the Louvre plates, was hesitant and his figures tended to be sketchy and awkwardly elongated. The well- proportioned figures and very ornately decorated borders seen on the Sacrifice of Isaac and June plates, would therefore suggest that they were painted at a later stage of his career, perhaps sometime after 1565 when he was no longer working with Limosin.