Italian, Siena, circa 1505-1520

Sir Otto Beit, Bt. K.C.M.G., and by descent to his daughter, Mrs. Arthur Bull;

Her sale, Christie’s London, 24 October 1946, lots 26 and 27;

Robert Strauss Collection;

His sale, Christie’s London, 21 June 1976, lots 20 and 21;

Sotheby’s New York, 24 May 1993, lot 140;

Rainer Zietz, London;

Where acquired, in 2008. 

In the words of Jörg Rasmussen “Sienese albarelli from the early sixteenth century should be regarded as among the absolutely best examples of functional vessels due to their balance of form and decoration, the creative imagination in the motifs, and unmatched depth of colour.” This pair are exceptionally fine examples.

Few albarelli have survived with features including the grotesque decoration with a small area of intense, dark red, a colour difficult to perfect and that required the highest technological skills that few mastered outside of Tuscany.

One main characteristic of Sienese ceramics are the much-favoured orange grounds. Grotesques ornaments on orange, black and blue grounds decorate the floor tiles of Sienese buildings. The best examples are the pavement of the Bichi Chapel in the Church of Sant ’Agostino, a documented work of 1488 executed by the Mazzaburroni workshop. Tiles with orange ground like the colour on the present pair of albarelli, were in the Oratory of Santa Caterina, about 1504-1505 and in the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena, circa 1509.

The composition and specific motif of grotesque decoration on these albarelli stem from of the pioneering artistic creativity of the painter Pinturicchio from the 1480s, inspired by the new discovery of Nero’s Golden House, in Rome, whose walls and vaults were decorated with grottesche and candelabra.

In 1502, Pinturicchio was commissioned to paint the Piccolomini Library in the Siena Cathedral which resulted in the breathtaking, black-ground grotesques in the vaults. The arrangement in horizontal bands against a ground in orange, yellow and blue of this pair of albarelli recalls that of the jar dated 1515, in the Metropolitan Museum of art in New York (Wilson, op.cit. 2016, no. 22, pp. 96, 97). The earliest known dated examples of this type of ornament on pharmacy jars are painted on black grounds and dated 1500 and 1501. 

RELATED LITERATURE

T. Wilson, The Golden Age of Italian Maiolica Painting. Catalogue of a private collection, Turin 2018, no. 185, pp. 412- 413;

T. Wilson in Maiolica: Italian Renaissance Ceramics in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016, no. 22, pp. 96-97;

J. Rasmussen, Museum fur Kunst and Gewerbe Hamburg, Italienische Majolika, 1984, p. 128;

A. van de Put, Pottery in the Collection of the late Sir Otto Beit, K.C.M.G, no. 769;

B. Rackham and A. van de Put, Pottery and Porcelain in the Collection of Mr. Otto Beit, 1916, no. 771.