Round Dish with an Erotic Scene
Unknown · c. 1520-1560
A large maiolica dish more than forty centimetres across, its wide rim painted with ornaments in blue, yellow and green on a white ground and its well occupied by a young man and a young woman. The subject is frankly amorous, and the potter did not hide it. Deruta, the Umbrian town where it was made, was famous for big display dishes of exactly this kind, painted in the high-temperature colours of the grand feu and intended for a sideboard rather than a table. Look at the freedom of the brushwork on the border and at the bold, slightly awkward drawing of the couple, typical of a workshop producing quickly for a broad market.
The dish was bought in eighteen forty-eight by Alexandre-Charles Sauvageot, a violinist at the Paris Opéra who became one of the great collectors of the Renaissance. His purchase book records it as a large round dish of Italian faience with Apollo and Daphne, marked obscene, price forty-two francs. Sauvageot gave his whole collection to the Louvre in eighteen fifty-six, and the notarial deed described the piece more discreetly as a young man and a young woman. A printed label on the back still bears his number.
Did You Know? The collector who bought it in 1848 wrote the word obscene in his purchase book and paid forty-two francs.
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