19
Blue and White Dish
with a Merchant Ship
Cafaggiolo
ca. 1510
Tin-glazed earthenware
H: 4.8 cm (1^7 /s in.)
Diam: 24.3 cm {9V16 in.)
84.DE.109MARKS AND INSCRIPTIONS
On the reverse, in blue, f° chafagguolo.CONDITION
Very small chips and slight rubbing on the inner
and outer borders of the rim; three stilt marks in
the well.PROVENANCE
Charles Loeser (1865-1928), Villa Gattaia, Tus
cany; by inheritance in his family (sold, Sotheby's,
London, December 8, 1959, lot 5 5, to A. Spero
[according to sale cat. notation]); [Alfred Spero,
London, sold to R. Strauss]; Robert Strauss,
England (sold, Christie's, London, June 21, 1976,
lot 19, to R. Zietz); [Rainer Zietz, Ltd., London,
sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984].EXHIBITIONS
Italian Renaissance Maiolica from the William
A. Clark Collection, Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, March 5-May 17, 1987.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cora and Fanfani 1982, 66, fig. 48; Morley-
Fletcher and Mcllroy 1984, 44, fig. i; GettyMusf
13 (1985): 242, no. 171; Hess 1988A, no. 21;
Mariaux 1995, 8o,- Summary Catalogue 2001,
no. 358.THE WELL OF THIS DEEP TONDINO displays a merchant
ship within interlocking ogival quatrefoils with fleurs-
de-lis and foliage sprays. The rim is decorated with four
musical trophies—a harp with sheets of music, a lute
with a scroll inscribed MVSICA, a reed pipe and wind
blower, and an urn and dulcimer—divided by stylized fo
liage sprays and arabesques. The reverse is embellished
with three sprays of scrolling foliage and marked in the
center J° chafagguolo. All of the painted decoration is ex
ecuted in blue pigment on a thin, creamy, yellowish
white ground. The clay body itself is of a very light yel
lowish buff color.
This type of delicate foliage and floral embellish
ment in blue on a white ground, typical of Chinese
porcelain, was much sought after in fifteenth- and six
teenth-century Italy (fig. 19B). It was imitated success
fully in maiolica—thanks to the medium's brilliant
white ground and stable cobalt oxide pigment—and
called alia porcellana decoration. This work is a particu
larly elaborate example from a group of similarly deco
rated alia porcellana bowls executed in Cafaggiolo in the
first quarter of the sixteenth century. Eight other knownpieces from this group include a small bowl or rounded
dish [tondino) decorated with a long-beaked bird (Cam
bridge, Fitzwilliam Museum);^1 a dish with a bird holding
a serpent in its beak (Faenza, Museo Internazionale delle
Ceramiche);^2 a tondino with flowers (Faenza, MuseoInternazionale delle Ceramiche, donazione Angiolo
Fanfani),-^3 a small bowl with a spotted coiling aquatic
animal (Florence, Museo Nazionale, Palazzo del Bargello,-
fig. 19D);^4 a tondino with a small branch bearing two
pears (Florence, Museo Nazionale, Palazzo del Bargello);^5
two small dishes with carracks, one erroneously said
to be located in storage at the Museo Nazionale, Palazzo
del Bargello, Florence (present location unknown);^6 and
the other in the B. Hockemeyer collection, Bremen,-^7 and
a tondino with a small branch bearing three acorns
(private collection, Berlin).^8 Like the Getty Museum's
dish, all of these works are marked J° chafagguolo on
the reverse.
At one point this inscription was interpreted as the
signature of a certain "Jacopo," identified as Jacopo di
Stefano di Filippo, son and nephew of the two brothers
Stefano and Piero, who moved in 1498 from their native
Montelupo to work in the Cafaggiolo workshop—rented
out to them by members of the Medici family—just
north of Florence in the Mugello Valley.^9 Jacopo di Ste
fano di Filippo, however, was born in the 1530s, twenty
years after the alia porcellana group of tondini seems to
have been produced.
Indeed, many Cafaggiolo marks have yet to be fully
understood. For example, of the roughly seventy-five
marked objects published in Gaelazzo Cora and Angiolo
Fanfani's 1982 volume La maiolica di Cafaggiolo, more
than half are marked SP or SPr, of which three also in
clude the words in Cafaggiolo and two the words in107