Dish: The Good Fruits, or the Penis Seller
Unknown · 1500-1520
A woman sits beside a basket piled with penises and holds up a scroll reading AIBO FRVTI DONE, good fruit, ladies, the cry of a market seller. The joke is as old as Roman comedy, and the dish, made in the Umbrian town of Deruta between fifteen hundred and fifteen twenty, was meant to raise a laugh at a banquet or in a bedroom. The rim carries the toothed pattern called wolf's teeth, and the surface shimmers with the red and mother-of-pearl lustre for which Deruta was famous, a thin film of metal deposited in a final smoky firing. Two holes pierced in the foot at the time of manufacture allowed the dish to be hung on a wall, so it was made to be seen.
The dish belonged to Alexandre-Charles Sauvageot, who bought it in eighteen thirty seven for sixty francs, describing it in his purchase book as a large lustred maiolica dish with a fruit seller, and gave it to the Louvre with his collection in eighteen fifty six. Satirical and erotic maiolica of this kind was produced in some numbers in Renaissance Italy, but few examples are as frank or as well preserved as this one.
Did You Know? Sauvageot's purchase book politely lists the dish as a fruit seller, and the notary who valued his donation followed suit.
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