18
Giovanni Battista Quadrone.
Vergognosa (detail), 1875. Oil on
panel, 26.5 x 26.3 cm (10/4 x io^3 /s in.).
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna
e Contemporanea, Bequest of Antonio
Abrate, 1926, inv. 991. The artist's
studio in this painting is bedecked
with a variety of objects. On the
cabinet above the nude model is a
late sixteenth-century Urbino vase.
It would have been prized by a nine
teenth-century collector as a romantic
evocation of another time and place.the 1950s: "The neglect of Italian porcelain by students
of art history in view of the importance of the wares in
the evolution of European porcelain is a piece of irony.
No study adequate to the importance of the wares has
ever been published, and a full survey has long been
overdue/7 25 This statement appears in the foreword to
one such survey published in 1954, that of Arthur Lane,
Honey's successor as keeper of the Department of
Ceramics. Although Honey passes over the work done by
Nino Brabantini and Morazzoni between the wars, his
comment does reveal the relative lack of interest in the
field. The year after Lane's book, Alice Wilson Frothing-
ham, curator at the Hispanic Society of New York, pub
lished her study of production under Charles III. In i960
a basic two-volume survey appeared, begun by the Mi
lanese professor Giuseppe Morazzoni and finished at
Morazzoni's death by another Milanese ceramics scholar,
Saul Levy. Although several fine studies of Italian porce
lain, some concentrating on specific centers, have ap
peared more recently—such as those by Francesco Stazzi,
Claire Le Corbeiller, Leonardo Ginori-Lisci, Alessandra
Mottola Molfino, and Angela Carola-Perrotti—much re
mains to be explored and understood in the field. The
hegemony of French and German porcelains seems to
have hindered exploration of the Italian versions.
By contrast, in the field of maiolica one might claim
that the first survey was presented in the mid-sixteenth
century by Cipriano Piccolpasso in his treatise / tie
libii delVaite del vasaio that includes a section in which
typologies and styles are categorized by center of pro
duction. However, the first serious and systematic at
tempts in Europe to identify and catalogue Italian
Renaissance maiolica began in the eighteenth century
when Giambattista Passeri published his Istoiia delle
pittuie in majolica fatte in Pesaio. By the late nine
teenth and early twentieth centuries collectors and
art historians with an interest in maiolica—such as
C. D. E. Fortnum, Alfred Darcel, Otto von Falke, Bernard
Rackham, Gaetano Ballardini, Giuseppe Liverani, and
Henry Wallis—began producing collection catalogues14 Introduction