Live Auction 1170Au Bord de la Mer Private Collections from St Tropez, Cap d'Antibes & A Swiss Villa
A DUCHY OF URBINO MAIOLICA ISTORIATO DISH
Lot 283

A DUCHY OF URBINO MAIOLICA ISTORIATO DISH

CIRCA 1550

Closed17 April 2013

Price Realised

GBP 13,750

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A DUCHY OF URBINO MAIOLICA ISTORIATO DISH
CIRCA 1550
Painted with a scene from the life of the Roman Emperor Trajan, the Emperor standing before a kneeling woman, the woman holding her dead child in her arms towards him, flanked by soldiers and before the ruins of classical buildings, with a river and hillside town in the distance, within a blue line and yellow band rim, the reverse inscribed in blue La vedua che presento El fiolle morte a troiano inperatore, small flat chip to underside of rim, minor flaking to glaze
11½ in. (29.2 cm.) diameter

J. Pierpont Morgan, New York (red painted inventory number P.M. 3075 and further indistinct inventory numbers in brown and red).
With H. Reichert, Munich, from whom it was acquired on 7 September 1979.

Specialist note

The 'Justice of Trajan' is a legendary episode in the life of Roman Emperor Trajan (53 AD - 117 AD), based upon the story told in the early medieval lives of St. Gregory. According to the story, Trajan, busy with preparations for the Dacian Wars, stopped his army in order to see justice done to a poor widow whose son had been killed. As he had been so just St. Gregory the Great prayed for his redemption from Hell. The episode is refered to in Dante's Purgatorio where Trajan appears on a marble carving described by Dante in book X, 74-84.

A dish painted by Nicola da Urbino with a different version of the same subject is illustrated by Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, London, 2009, pp.234-235, no. 144. Another armorial example, formerly at Cliveden, is in the Thompson Collection, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and a third in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum is illustrated by Johanna Lessmann, Italienische Majolika, Brunswick, 1979, p. 177, no. 153, again of differing composition to the present lot.