Jug with a Human Face
Unknown · c. 1480
A small jug with a trefoil spout carries, in relief on its belly, the head of a young man or a child, so that the vessel seems to look back at whoever pours from it. The jug is tin-glazed earthenware, made around fourteen eighty either in Faenza, the town that gave its name to faience, or in Pesaro on the Adriatic coast, both early centres of Renaissance maiolica. The modelled face, in the manner of an antique mask, shows potters borrowing from classical sculpture as the fashion for the antique spread through Italian workshops. Only sixteen centimetres high, it would have served for wine or water at table.
The jug was among the last purchases of the Paris collector Alexandre-Charles Sauvageot, who bought it in eighteen fifty five for eighty francs, noting it as an Italian faience pot with a handle and a projecting child's head. The notarial deed of his donation, drawn up in March eighteen fifty seven, valued it at two hundred francs and described the mask as being after the antique. Sauvageot's gift of eighteen fifty six brought well over a thousand objects to the Louvre and remains the foundation of its collection of Renaissance ceramics.
Did You Know? Between purchase and donation the little jug's value rose from eighty to two hundred francs, at least in the eyes of Sauvageot's notary.
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