Italian Ceramics: Catalogue of the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection

31

Molded Dish with an

Allegory of Love

Faenza

ca. 1535

Tin-glazed earthenware

H: 7.3 cm (2% in.)

Diam: 28 cm (n in.)

84.DE.11 4

MARKS AND INSCRIPTIONS

None.

CONDITION

Glaze chip on the underside; minor chips

at the rim.

PROVENANCE

Prince Thibaut d'Orleans, Paris (sold, Sotheby's,

London, February 5, 1974, lot 30); [Rainer Zietz,

Ltd., London, sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum,

1984].

EXHIBITIONS

None.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GettyMusJ 13 (1985): 242, no. 168; Hess 1988A,

no. 27; Cohen and Hess 1993, 62; Summary Cata­

logue 2001, no. 369.

CERAMIC CRESPINE — FROM THE ITALIAN CRESPA,

meaning pleat or wrinkle—were forms molded in imita­

tion of gadrooned metalwork designs which were popu­

lar from roughly the second quarter of the sixteenth

century on. The shallow body of this footed crespina is

molded with flutes that issue from a low central boss.

This convex boss, surrounded by a painted rope motif,

displays a youth in contemporary courtly dress seated

against and bound to a tree painted in ocher, yellow, and

blue, heightened with white on a light blue ground.

Light blue leaves, foliate scrolls, and stylized dolphins,

accented with white and reserved on alternately dark

blue and ocher grounds, decorate the petal-shaped a

quartieh (sectioned) panels around the boss. The reverse

is glazed with the same light blue berettino and is

painted with alternately dark blue and ocher dashes fol­

lowing the molded panels^7 shapes around the foot.

The central figure on the raised boss represents an al­

legory of love: the young man is tied to love much as he

is bound to the tree. Love portrayed in this manner was a

popular subject of the time. The same allegory appears,

for example, in a Florentine engraving ofca. 1465-80 en­

titled Woman and Captive's Heart, made for the decora­

tive cover of a woman's toiletries box or workbox, in

which a standing youth bound to a tree faces a young

woman who holds his heart in her hand (fig. 31B).^1 A

lustered plate from the workshop of Giorgio Andreoli of

Gubbio (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv.

65.6.10) portrays a man bound to a tree confronted by a

woman with a knife. Whether she intends to liberate or

wound the man is unclear, but the inscription on this

piece, Medol limfamio tua: piu ch[e] [i]l morire (your

disgrace [of me] hurts more than death), expresses a par­

ticularly painful view of love. In contrast to the glorified

images of love popular on ceramic coppe amatorie, the

series of molded dishes to which the Getty Museum's

crespina belongs portrays love as a bittersweet force that

holds its victims captive.

31A Reverse.

174