Fragment of a pentagonal tile from the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena: C.127-1927

Titles

Fragment of a pentagonal tile from the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena

Maker(s)

Maker: Unidentified Siena pottery

Entities

• Tile fragment
• fragment of a tile

Categories

• Tin-glazed earthenware
• Maiolica

Description

Cream earthenware, tin-glazed on the upper surface. Painted in dark blue, green, yellow, orange, brownish-red, and, on the border tile, black. Pentagonal with part of the right and left sides chipped off.
The main field has a yellow ground decorated with grotesques: a vase and a mask on a pole between addorsed griffins seated on a bowl, flanked by foliated scrolls. The border comprises a narrow row of oval and circular beads, and a wider row of egg and dart ornament.

Notes

History note: Purportedly purchased in Siena by F. Leverton Harris.

Legal notes

F. Leverton Harris Bequest, 1926

Place(s) associated

• Siena ⪼ Tuscany ⪼ Italy

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Bequeathed (1927) by Harris, F. Leverton, The Right Hon.

Dating

16th Century, Early
Renaissance
Production date: circa AD 1509

Note

The use of ornamental grotesques gained impetus in Italy after the discovery in about 1480 of the painted decoration of Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome. By then its rooms were below ground and became known as grotte, from which the term grot¬tesche was derived. Taken up by artists such as Pinturicchio and Signor¬elli, and dissemi¬nated by prints, grotesques rapidly became one of the most popular forms of Renaissance decoration. Maiolica potters working in Siena had local examples in the splendid pendentives of the vault in the Piccolom¬ini Library in the Cathe¬dral, which was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini from Pintur¬icchio and was com¬pleted about 1507. This tile fragment (and C.128-1927, C.129-1927, and C.130-1927) and another border tile fragment which has lost most of its glaze (C.131-1927) formed part of a tile pavement commissioned by Pandolfo Petrucci (1452-1512) for the Camera Bella, one of a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Petrucci which were to be occupied by his heir Borghesi Petrucci on his marriage to Vittoria Piccolomini which took place on 22 September 1509. The room is thought to have been decorated between 1508 and Petrucci's death, and three of the tiles are dated 1509. The pavement comprises pentagonal tiles of two sizes, square tiles and rectangular border tiles. Some of the square tiles are decorated with the quartered arms of Piccolomini and Petrucci, celebrating the 1509 marriage, or with trophies, or with figures in landscapes reminiscent of those by Pinturicchio, Signorelli and Genga. The majority are decorated with grotesques, and the pavement as a whole is one of the most outstanding illustrations of this genre on early sixteenth-century maiolica. Miller and Graves (see Documentation) have shown that the tiles were originally arranged in a way which produced an eight-pointed star and cross pattern comparable to Islamic star and cross tile patterns. The cross being formed by a square tile with four pentagonal tiles around it and the star by a small square with four small pentagonal tiles to form a cross, and four contrasting square tiles in the spaces between them. The earliest recorded date for the dispersal of the pavement is November 1854 when the British Museum purchased one from the estate of a London dealer, William Forrest, who died in that year. (inv. 1854,11-2,2). The largest group surviving together is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which acquired 475 tiles from the pavement in the 1857, but now has about 433, and there are over 90 in other collections. Further examples in Britain , are six in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, two in the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh, two in the Courtauld Gallery, London, and two fragments probably from the pavement in the Brtiish Museum. When cataloguing the seventeen tiles in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Ham¬burg in 1984, Rasmussen listed the locations of other tiles from the pavement, and his list was updated and added to by Thornton and Wilson in 2009. The largest group is held by the Musée du Louvre. (See Documention).

School or Style

Renaissance