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Lot Essay
The arms (azure a mount of three peaks or surmounted by flames gules), are currently unidentified. Another example from this service (sold by Christie’s, Paris on 5 November 2014, lot 5) is illustrated by Timothy Wilson, The Golden Age of Italian Maiolica-Painting, Turin, 2018, pp. 130-131, no. 53, where it is attributed to Faenza. Two armorial broad-rimmed bowls in the British Museum with related but slightly different decoration (also with radiating lappets on the reverses) are identified as possibly Faenza or perhaps Siena(1). In 1909 the maiolica scholar Gaetano Ballardini wrote to the scholar, collector and benefactor C. Drury E. Fortnum informing him that fragments with very similar decoration had been excavated at Faenza, and fragments in the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza also support a Faentine attribution(2).
1. This attribution is based on the crossed diamond marks appearing on the reverse of two other pieces in the set, of a type associated with Siena or Montelupo, and an alla porcellana design which is similar to an armorial piece which bears Sienese arms. See Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, London, 2009, Vol. I, pp. 182-183.
2. Noted by Thornton and Wilson, ibid., 2009, Vol. I, p. 183.
1. This attribution is based on the crossed diamond marks appearing on the reverse of two other pieces in the set, of a type associated with Siena or Montelupo, and an alla porcellana design which is similar to an armorial piece which bears Sienese arms. See Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, London, 2009, Vol. I, pp. 182-183.
2. Noted by Thornton and Wilson, ibid., 2009, Vol. I, p. 183.