Provenance
Collection J.G.R. Strasburg;
Christie’s Milan, 8 june 2004, lot 439;
Sotheby’s London, 3 july 2013, lot 3;
Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah al Thani, Paris, Hotel Lambert, until 2022.
Related Literature
Timothy WILSON, Maiolica. Italian Renaissance Ceramics in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Highlights of the Collection, with an essay by Luke Syson, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2016
Timothy WILSON, Italian Maiolica and Europe, Medieval, Renaissance, and later Italian pottery in theAshmolean Museum, Oxford, with some examples illustrating the spread of tin-glazed pottery across Europe, Oxford, 2017.
Large majolica plate with a bianco sopra bianco decoration and a mythological image in the centre of the plate: Venus with a small Cupid (Amor) holding a bow. The rim of the plate is decorated with tendrils with blue leaves and red berries wound around a thin blue ribbon.
Bianco sopra bianco is an ornamental element with a white ground, opaque white flowers and tendrils. This form of decoration was used from the late 1480s onwards. A plate from a service made in Pesaro for Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, commissioned by his wife Beatrice of Aragon, that is now to be found in the British Museum, dates from this period (cf. Wilson 2016, p. 168 and Wilson 2017, p. 231). From the 1520s, bianco sopra bianco decoration was used in Urbino for istoriato plates and reached its heyday in the 1540s.
In his book Li tre libri dell’arte del vasajo (The Three Books of the Potters’ Art), an important source on the production of maiolica, Cipriano Piccolpasso (1524–79) details the composition of the clay, the shapes of vessels and the glazes used and, in one drawing, explicitly describes the bianco sopra bianco decorative style as ‘usourbinato’ – common to Urbino.
