CIRCA 1565-70, PROBABLY WORKSHOP OF ORAZIO FONTANA

This pharmacy jar, depicting a queen seated on a throne and flanked by putti in a continuous landscape, belongs to a well-known pharmacy set which scholars have recently suggested might possibly have been made for a Florentine pharmacy, as the queen holds a sceptre with a fleur-de-lis, the emblem of Florence. Three spouted jars painted with the same enthroned figure are in the Louvre Museum, Paris and illustrated by Jeanne Giacomotti, Catalogue des majoliques des musées nationaux, Paris, 1974, pp. 337-338, nos. 1028, 1029 and 130, together with an albarello of the same type, no. 1031, preserved at Sèvres, Cité de la céramique. Three further albarelli, painted with the same allegorical princess are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and illustrated by Jörg Rasmussen, Italian Majolica in the Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989, pp. 172-173, nos. 102 and 103. A related documentary vase and cover painted with a very similar figure of a queen seated on a dias flanked by attendants, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (museum no.8969-1863), and is inscribed 'FATTO IN VRBINO' (made in Urbino).¹ A syrup-jar of the same type was sold at Christie's in Paris on 2 July 2008, lot 74, and a further example also from the set, was sold at Christie's in Milan on 5 December 2005, lot 569. The inscription on the label probably refers to a preparation made from prunes.

1. Illustrated by Bernard Rackham, Catalogue of Italian Maiolica, Vol. II, London, 1940, no. 836.