THREE ITALIAN ALBARELLI

VOR some time past Italian fifteenth-century maiolica has been much sought after, and very justly; it would appear, however, that, so far, it is more admired than understood. Without doubt several works have been devoted to this subject. But if we attempt to divide it up into several groups, the various classifications seem neither very clear nor very definitive.

The three druggists' jars which have just been acquired by the Louvre will help in a certain degree to fix the date and to determine the centre of activity of one of the factories which we are trying to reconstitute at the present moment-a factory which Mr. Fraschetti has made his special study (in L'Arte, 1898), as also Mr. Stettiner has done.1 Articles from this factory are characterized by a decoration of long, large leaves, curving back at the end, half white and half painted, the veining only being indicated on the back side; these leaves are intermingled with a peculiar style of decoration, in which the eyes of peacocks' feathers are presented together with large, round, blue and yellow flowers, standing out from a background of slender blue scroll-pattern. The principal pieces of this ware have been found at Rome. They are notably the druggists' jars of the hospital of St. John Lateran, those of the apothecary Bruti, near the bridge of S. Angelo, the paving tiles in one of the chapels of the church of S. Maria del Popolo, and those in the church of S. Maria della Verità at Viterbo.2 From this fact it has been concluded that this factory, which sprang more or less directly from Faenza, and which produced a great deal, must have been situated in Rome; and it has been proposed

1 'Ausstellung von Kunstwerken des Mittelalters und der Renaissance aus Berliner Privatbesitz, Berlin, 1899, 4to, PP. 170-173.

Wallis: Italian Ceramic Art-the Maiolica Pavement Tiles of the Fifteenth Century,' London, 1902, 12mo, figs. 10-24.

to call it, at least provisionally, the Roman factory. The three albarelli in the Louvre belong, as the accompanying figures will show, to this class, for they are all decorated on one side with the large peculiar leaves. The most important of these jars, from an artistic point of view, bears on the front side the bust of a beardless man, which will at once recall similar figures on the Viterbo pavement. Before the face waves a streamer, upon which the maker (who was evidently very illiterate) has traced an inscription, which does not seem to convey any meaning whatever :AR IERIN RIN E I RE. The two other jars are, truth to tell, but very mediocre specimens, but they are of great interest to the archaeologist, for they are decorated with armorial shields which furnish us with some very useful information. On one of these shields are quartered the arms of Aragon and Jerusalem; on the other are the same arms parti per pale with those of Milan. These armorial bearings 2 (very distinct though slightly simplified by the maker, as is generally the case) tell us for whom these jars were manufactured; they belonged, in fact, to Alfonzo II of Aragon, king of Naples and Sicily, who reigned one year (from 1494 to 1495) and died in the latter year at the age of forty-seven. He married in 1465 Hippolyta Maria Sforza (daughter of Francesco Sforza I, duke of Milan, and Bianca-Maria Visconti), who died at Naples in 1484.3 These albarelli, which bear the coats-of-arms of the king and queen, must have been made between 1465 and 1484, or at the latest before 1495. Therefore they were made for a Neapolitan prince, and, furthermore, they come from Palermo. This would agree very well with the hypothesis of

1 Owing to a mistake of the photographer, the figure of this jar is reversed.

2 They are found again, slightly more elaborated, upon an albarello of the same series in the British museum. Another one belongs to an amateur in Berlin.

3 According to Litta; Moreri gives different dates.

4 They bear the stamp of a convent in that town.