A MAIOLICA RENAISSANCE POT TURNS UP IN A HOUSE IN SOMERSET, ENGLAND

After returning to the UK from Italy after our January house search we had talked over and over about what to do next and still had the three properties we'd looked at in our sight line to the extent we decided to go back and have a second look with the prospect of making an offer on one of them. Jon went ahead and booked for us to fly back to Italy during February from Stansted to Pisa. 

Italian Maiolica Dish - c1540

I'm passionate about the history of ceramics and have indeed been lucky enough to have written several books on the subject. I was thus looking forward with anticipation to being able to research and write about Italian ceramics. It's strange how when you become involved with something that all sort of co-incidences occur which bring related items and subjects together. So it was on the morning of February 16th last year when I picked up a stray copy of the Daily Mail during my morning commute in to London. On an inside page there was a picture of an Italian Renaissance ceramic dish of the type I have only ever encountered in major museum collections like those of the Victoria and Albert Museum or the Wallace Collection in London. The illustration was accompanied by a short article entitled "THE RENAISSANCE COMES TO SOMERSET". Here was a story to cause salivation in abundance for anyone interested in Italian pottery for this piece was a rare and important dish.

It was made from a type of ceramic ware called tin-glazed earthenware and it was hand-painted in a colourful Mediterranean palate with a narrative scene. A representative from Charterhouse auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset had visited a Somerset cottage in November 2012 to do a general appraisal and found this dish hanging on the kitchen wall by a slender wire the likes of which gives anyone with an interest in historic ceramics palpitations! The valuer knew he had made a massively important find and immediately told the owner, subject to confirmation, that it could be worth as much as £100,000 at auction. The dish was subsequently examined by an Oxford museum curator who confirmed it to have been made in Urbino, in about 1540. Measuring 16.5 inches across the dish's colourful subject matter was also identified by the curator as being biblical - the story of "The Feast of Herod" and probably painted after an engraving made by a German print maker, Sebald Beham (1500 - 1550). The piece was in excellent condition apart from a single re-stuck chip to the rim. 

Detail of the chip on the rim of the 16th century dish

The dish was finally put up for sale by the auctioneers in their Dorset rooms on February 14th 2013 in a single lot sale. It sold for the magnificent sum of £460,000 plus 19.5% buyer's premium taking its sale price overall to £587,000. It was bought by a Bond Street specialist. This wonderful dish had turned out to be a very special and important type of pottery known as "istoriato" maiolica made in Renaissance Italy in the mid 16th century and owned by the likes of the powerful Medici family. How on earth had it ended up on the wall of a humble cottage in Dorset, England? No one will ever know the answer to that simple question.


Well - that's a small introduction to the subject of Italian ceramics and I'll be back with more about this topic in another posting.