Dish: C.21-1995

Maker(s)

Painter: Sforza di Marcantonio
Printmaker: Veneziano, Agostino
Printmaker: Dente, Marco (Marco da Ravenna)

Entities

• Dish

Categories

• Tin-glazed earthenware
• Maiolica

Description

Earthenware, tin-glazed, painted in blue, greyish-green, yellow, orange, shades of brown, and black; the reverse is pale beige and has several pin holes. Circular with wide sloping rim and shallow curved well, convex in the centre.
The front is decorated overall with the Suicide of Hero. In the foreground, Leander lies drowned in the Hellespont. On the right, a man seated on a rock looks towards him, raising his right arm. On the left, Cupid stands holding a flaming torch. In the background there is an archway inscribed 'AMOR.NE. CAVSA' (Love is the cause of it), the lower part of a tower, and a doorway with a window above. Hero is shown throwing herself from a window in the tower. The edge is encircled by a very narrow black band and a wide yellow band. The back is decorated with a wreath of blue leaves on a continuous wavy stem. The base is inscribed in blue, 'Leandro in Mare &./Hero alla finestra/.61./.S.

Notes

History note: Purchased. Given to the vendor's husband by his mother, who bought it an antique shop.

Legal notes

Purchased with the F. Leverton Harris Fund and the Leonard D. Cunliffe Fund

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Bought (1995)

Dating

16th Century
Renaissance
Production date: dated AD 1561 : dated '61'

Note

During the second and third decades of the sixteenth century the maiolica industry in Pesaro was less flourishing than in the previous century. This situation improved after Guidobaldo II della Rovere succeeded to the dukedom of Urbino in 1538, because he preferred to live at Pesaro. The presence of the court stimulated local industries, and from around 1540 Pesaro became a significant producer of istoriato maiolica, that is, painted with narrative scenes.

Hero was a priestess of Venus at Sestos. Leander, her lover, used to swim the Hellespont to see her, guided by a torch which she held up from the window of a high tower. One night in winter, when Hero had begged him to come despite the inclement weather, he was drowned, and she committed suicide by throwing herself from the tower. The lovers were mentioned in Ovid's Heroides, 18 and 19.

Sforza di Marcantonio da Casteldurante was recorded as a potter, and sometimes also as a painter in documents in Pesaro between in 1550 and 1552, and almost every year from 1563 until 1580, when he made his will on 17 November, and probably died shortly after. He signed himself 'SFORZA' on two panels dated 1567, respectively in the British Museum and the Museo Civico Medievale, Bologna. Dishes signed '.S.' in 1561, as this one is, and in some years up to and including 1576, are attributed to him on the basis of similarities with these panels. Sforza's choice of subjects, iconography, and inscriptions suggest that during the late 1530s he had been contact with the Urbino maiolica painter, Francesco Xanto, whose latest signed works are dated in 1542. Several of Sforza's designs closely follow those on plates by Xanto, who painted several dishes with versions of 'Hero and Leander' between 1532 and 1538. Xanto probably knew the story from a translation of Ovid's Heroides, but on the backs of the dishes he quoted from Francesco Petrarch's Trionfi, III, 21 'Leandro in mare ed Hero a la fenestra' (or Trionfi, II in editions with commentary by Bernardo Ilicini, first published in 1475). The first dish decorated with this subject which is attributed to Sforza was painted in 1546 (Christie's, 25 May 1962, lot 110); the latest, in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, is dated 1576, and initialled '.S.' Both, like the Fitzwilliam's dish, have an inscription from Petrarch, and the figure of Leander used by Xanto, which was taken from a Marcantonio Raimondi school print, known as the 'Battle with the Cutlass' by Marco Dente (Bartsch, XIV, p 171, no. 211), or Agostino da Veneziano. The three dishes illustrate the persistence of popular themes over a long period, the influence of an outstanding maiolica painter on another, and the repetitive nature of much maiolica painting.

School or Style

Renaissance