Workshop of the Fontana Family

Christie's Paris, 15 May 2003, lot 535;

Angela Gräfin von Wallwitz, Munich;

Where acquired, in May 2003.

This pair of wet drug jars are part of a large pharmacy set that was comparable in scale to the stupendous series made by the Fontana Workshop for the apothecary of the Santa Casa di Loreto and still preserved there (Wilson in Tin-glaze and image culture the MAK maiolica collection, Vienna, 2022, p.98). Orazio Fontana and his father Guido Durantino (by 1541 he adopted the surname Fontana) ran one of the most successful workshops in Urbino. They enjoyed the patronage of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, who may have commissioned the workshop to produce the Loreto.

Wilson (Wilson and Marcucci, op. cit., 2020, note 22, pp. 28, 41) refers to a manuscript of 1800 and associates jars from the present series with a complete set of pharmacy jars attributed to Orazio Fontana known to have existed in Rome in the “Speziaria appellata della Regina”. Jars from this Roman pharmacy known as “the Queen’s pharmacy” were apparently dispersed not long after 1800 .

A closely comparable wet drug jar of nearly identical size and form to the present pair is in the collection of the Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia and was published by Wilson and Sani in Le maioliche rinascimentali nelle collezioni della Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia (2006-7, I, cat. no. 55). Two additional albarelli are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. nos. 1975.1.995 and 1975.1.996), and a similar wet drug jar was sold at Christie’s Paris on 15 May 2003 (lot 535), while a two-handled pharmacy jar of comparable size appeared at Christie’s London on 2 November 2016, lot 199. 

RELATED LITERATURE

T. Wilson in L. Hollein, R. Franz, and T. Wilson, Tin-Glaze and Image Culture. The MAK Maiolica Collection in its Wider Context. Catalogue by Timothy Wilson. Vienna/Stuttgart, 2022, p. 98; T. Wilson, F. Marcucci, "Alcune notizie su Orazio Fontana e altri ceramisti urbinati da manoscritti conservati a Urbino e Pesaro." in Faenza, vol. 106, no. 1, 2020, pp. 23–45; J. Rasmussen, Italian Majolica in the Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1989, pp. 154-158, nos. 90-91; T. Wilson, E.P. Sani, Le maioliche rinascimentali nelle collezioni della Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia, 2006, cat. no. 55; P. Casati Migliorini, “Un corredo farmaceutico ancora in cerca della sua spezieria", in Ceramica Antica, May 2001, pp. 12-26; T. Wilson, Italian Maiolica of the Renaissance, Milan, 1996, no. 124, pp. 295-297; J. E. Poole, Italian Maiolica and Incised Slipware in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 377; C. Ravanelli Guidotti, Maioliche italiane, catalogo della mostra, Collezione Chigi Saracini del Monte dei Paschi di Siena, exh. cat., Faenza, 1992, pp. 117-126; R. E. A. Drey, Apothecary Jars: Pharmaceutical Pottery and Porcelain in Europe and the East, 1150–1850, with a Glossary of Terms Used in Apothecary Jar Inscriptions. London/Boston, 1978, no. 24a-24b.