Lot 226: AN URBINO ISTORIATO DATED DISH

1533
Almost certainly painted by Giulio da Urbino with Europa and the Bull, her attendants standing beside a tree and pointing towards a herd of three bulls including a fine seated white bull, in the distance Europa astride the bull being carried off across the sea, flanked by buildings and trees within a blue line and yellow band rim, the underside centrally inscribed in blue 1533 De giove ede europa Nel. iii. libro d hovidia. M: In urbino (flaking, very slight chipping and fritting to rim)
10 3/8 in. (26.3 cm.) diam.

Dora Thornton, 'An Allegory of the Sack of Rome by Giulio da Urbino', Apollo June 1999, p. 12, fig. 2.

Anon., sale Christie's London, 28th June 1993, lot 182.

THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN

Dora Thornton, in her article (loc. cit, pp. 11-18), attributes this dish to Giulio da Urbino. The article discusses the similarities between the work of Giulio da Urbino and his mentor, Francesco Xanto Avelli da Rovigo, and that Giulio's work is frequently identified with, or confused with, Xanto's. As she discusses, both sometimes used the same print sources, although Giulio appears to have been less reliant on them than Xanto, but their exact working relationship is still unclear.

The subject recorded in the inscription on the reverse of the dish (1533 De giove ede europa Nel. iii. libro d hovidia. M[etamorfosi]: In urbino) is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses and depicts Jupiter, disguised in the form of a bull, carrying Europa, the King of Tyre's daughter, across the sea to Crete where he changed back into his usual form to ravish her. The inscription appears to be by the same hand as that of the dish recently acquired by the British Museum (1997) painted with an allegory of the Sack of Rome, dated 1534 and signed Giulio da Urbino (see Dora Thornton loc. cit, pp. 15-16, figs 8 and 9). The only other known signed piece is a jug in Bologna, dated 1535 (see Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti, Ceramiche occidentali del Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna [Bologna, 1985], no. 80).

For other pieces of this type, also dated 1533, see Ballardini, Corpus, II, figs. 101-103 and figs. 148, 149 and pl. IX for examples dated 1534. The other example with this subject (Ballardini loc. cit, fig. 103) is in the Walters Art Gallery and is illustrated by Joan Prentice von Erdberg and Marvin C. Ross, Catalogue of the Italian Majolica in the Walters Art Gallery (1952), no. 54.


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