DATED 1530, LUSTRED AND PROBABLY ALSO MADE IN THE GUBBIO WORKSHOP OF MAESTRO GIORGIO ANDREOLI

Details

A DUCHY OF URBINO MAIOLICA DATED RUBY-LUSTRED 'BELLA DONNA' FOOTED DISH
DATED 1530, LUSTRED AND PROBABLY ALSO MADE IN THE GUBBIO WORKSHOP OF MAESTRO GIORGIO ANDREOLI
Painted with the bust-length portrait of a finely dressed young woman wearing a coral necklace and coral earrings, her yellow and black damask cap enriched in lustre, against a blue ground lustred with stars and reserved with a scrolling ribbon inscribed LA · BEL LA · IVSTINA, the reverse inscribed in ruby lustre with 1530 / M^oG^o within the foot, surrounded by four lustred scrolling foliate stems
8 ¾ in. (22.1 cm.) diameter

Provenance

Probably the lustred ‘Faustina’ piece owned by Count Ferdinando Pasolini Dall’Onda, Faenza.
Probably by descent to Count Benvenuto Pasolini Dall’Onda, his sale (sold anonymously as ‘Catalogue d’un belle collection de Majoliques Italiennes des diverses fabriques des XV^e, XVI^e & XVII^e siècles’); Ridel & Roussel, Rue de Jeuneurs 42, Paris, 13-15 December 1853, lot 177.
Baron Édouard de Rothschild (1868-1949).
Confiscated from the above by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg following the Nazi occupation of France in May 1940 (ERR no. R 4038).
Recovered by the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Section from the Altaussee salt mines, Austria, and transferred to the Munich Central Collecting Point, 23 June 1945 (MCCP no. 339/12).
Returned to France on 9 January 1946 and restituted to the Rothschild family.
By descent to the present owners.

Literature

Luigi Frati, Del Museo Pasolini in Faenza, Descrizione, Bologna, 1852, no. 40.

Conditions of sale

Lot Essay

The inscription translates as ‘the beautiful Justina’. This bella donna dish is very similar to group of dishes which may have been painted by the same hand. The example (also dated 1530) in the British Museum, London, is published by Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, London, 2009, Vol. II, pp. 517-518, no. 318, along with a listing of other known similar examples. The authors suggest that they were almost certainly made and painted in Gubbio, rather than being made at Castel Durante or Urbino and sent to Gubbio to be lustred.

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