Castel Durante - Lot 63

Castel Durante Albarello in majolica with polychrome decoration of three angels with an old man. old man and on the base a pharmaceutical inscription in a in a band. Boerio family coat of arms on reverse. Workshop of Ludovico and Andrea Picchi. 16th century, circa 1560 H. 30 cm Restorations. This albarello belongs to a set from one of the best-documented pharmaceutical commissions of the 16th century. In 1562, Andrea Boerio, a Genoese merchant based in Palermo Palermo in Sicily, placed an order with the potters of Castel Durante potters. In two separate contracts, he requested the manufacture of several hundred medicine jars, meticulously specifying the desired shapes, dimensions and decorations. Some of these vessels were to be decorated with historiated scenes (a istoriato), others with trophy motifs (trofei). The brothers Ludovico and Angelo Picchi, heirs to their father's workshop of their father Giorgio Picchi (died 1535), were entrusted with this commission. Their workshop, one of the busiest in Castel Durante, employed several specialized painters. However, when not all the pieces were delivered on time, Boerio summoned the potters before the court of the Duke of Urbino, forcing them to pay compensation. Today, more than fifty pharmacy jars from this commission of this order have come down to us. All bear Boerio's coat of arms; one is dated 1562 and two others 1563. The decorator of the albarelli, probably the city's most active istoriato painter in the 1550s, was also commissioned to decorate a large service with an unidentified coat of arms. accompanied by the motto "SAPIES DOMINABITUR ASTRIS". Three pieces in this set bear the date 1551. Among works that appear to be by the same hand, a bowl in the Arezzo museum bears the name "andrea da negroponto" on the reverse. An albarello from this set is in the Musée du Louvre, see Jeanne Giacomotti, Catalogue des Majoliques des Musées Nationaux, 1974, p. 241, fig. 793. See also the two albarelli in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, reproduced by Timothy Wilson, Italian Maiolica and Europe: Medieval and Later Italian Pottery in the Ashmolean Museum, 2017, pp. 193-195, no. 79.