CIRCA 1559, WORKSHOP OF GUIDO DURANTINO

Details

An Urbino large armorial dish from the Salviati Service
CIRCA 1559, WORKSHOP OF GUIDO DURANTINO
Painted with an extensive landscape with huts, buildings and fortified towers with turrets on islands across the mouth of an estuary, the foreground with trees on a central island and five women walking across a bridge from a gatehouse before a fortified town on the left, a small pack of animals on another island to the bottom left, the distant shore littered with further buildings below mountains, the sky centred on the border with a coat of arms within a yellow strapwork escutcheon interwoven with billowing ribbons and surmounted by a female mask, the sides with masks suspending garlands, within a blue line and ochre band rim, the underside with three further yellow-ochre concentric bands (the majority lacquered, slight chipping to rim, principally to underside, chip to glaze at edge of well at 4 o'clock, further slight chipping and flaking to glaze at edge of well between 2 and 4 o'clock)
15 5/8 in. (39.5 cm.) diam.

Provenance

Presumably Jacopo di Alamanno Salviati who married his cousin, Isabella Salviati, in 1559.
By descent in the Salviati family, probably until the early 18th century.
Imbert Collection, according to the collection label attached to reverse.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis

Lot Essay

Since the 19th century many of the pieces of this service have appeared on the market. A list of all the then known pieces was published by Julia Poole, 'Italian Maoilica in the Fitzwilliam Museum' Catalogue (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 369-371, where the present lot is mentioned in footnote 19. Although there were originally 24 large dishes in the service, only two, the present lot and a dish in the Victoria & Albert Museum, appear to have survived.

Many pieces from this service have been sold in these Rooms in the past 150 years. Michael J. Brody, 'Terra d'Urbino tutta dipinta a paesi con l'armi de'Salviati': the paesi service in the 1583 inventory of Jacopo di Alamanno Salviati (1537-1586), in Faenza anno LXXXVI , no. 4-6, pp. 30-46, discusses the early history and genesis of this service. This seminal article establishes the composition and early history of this, one of the most important armorial services of the time.

Variously ascribed to Venice and to Andrea di Negroponte in Casteldurante, the service is now convincingly given to the Workshop of Guido Durantino in Urbino. As Brody observes, the 'paesi' on the Salviati service correspond closely to the similar subject illustrated by Piccolpasso in 1557.

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