.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The inscription may be Lu[c]elio [h]omo Roma[n]o (Lucilius the Roman man).
Although the style of decoration on this dish bears similarities to the work of the painter whom the scholar Bernard Rackham dubbed the ‘Saint John Painter’(1) or the painter he called the ‘Caricature Painter’(2), it appears to be by a different hand. As noted by Timothy Wilson, ‘it is difficult to know how many artists were active in what has been called the primo istoriato, the first phase of full istoriato-painting, at Faenza (roughly between 1495 and 1520), and such stylistic judgements have a subjective element to them’(3).
1. Named by Rackham after a dish in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, see Rackham, Catalogue of Italian Maiolica, London, 1940, Vol. I, no. 266.
2. This is because of the slightly caricature-type profiles of the faces. Rackham used the term for a dish in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, see Julia E. Poole, Italian maiolica and incised slipware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1995, no. 326 and p. 248 and note 25. Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti has argued that the two painters are the same person, see Ravanelli Guidotti, ‘Un’opera del “Pittore delle caricaqture” della donazione Galeazzo Cora’, Faenza, 90, nos. 1-6, 2004, p. 21.
3. Timothy Wilson, The Golden Age of Italian Maiolica-Painting, Turin, 2018, p. 125.
Although the style of decoration on this dish bears similarities to the work of the painter whom the scholar Bernard Rackham dubbed the ‘Saint John Painter’(1) or the painter he called the ‘Caricature Painter’(2), it appears to be by a different hand. As noted by Timothy Wilson, ‘it is difficult to know how many artists were active in what has been called the primo istoriato, the first phase of full istoriato-painting, at Faenza (roughly between 1495 and 1520), and such stylistic judgements have a subjective element to them’(3).
1. Named by Rackham after a dish in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, see Rackham, Catalogue of Italian Maiolica, London, 1940, Vol. I, no. 266.
2. This is because of the slightly caricature-type profiles of the faces. Rackham used the term for a dish in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, see Julia E. Poole, Italian maiolica and incised slipware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1995, no. 326 and p. 248 and note 25. Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti has argued that the two painters are the same person, see Ravanelli Guidotti, ‘Un’opera del “Pittore delle caricaqture” della donazione Galeazzo Cora’, Faenza, 90, nos. 1-6, 2004, p. 21.
3. Timothy Wilson, The Golden Age of Italian Maiolica-Painting, Turin, 2018, p. 125.