When Otto von Falke published this piece in 1912, he attributed it to the Casa Pirota workshop, as it was thought that blue or berettino ground borders with grotesques were made there, but this has subsequently been disputed, and this type of decoration is now associated with the workshop of Piero (or Pietro) and Paolo Bergantini, one of the principal maiolica workshops in Faenza in the first half of the 16th century (A.V.B. Norman, ‘A note on the So-called Casa Pirota Mark’, Burlington Magazine, III, 1969, pp. 447-448, and J.V.G. Mallet, ‘Maiolica at Polesden Lacey’, Part 1, Apollo Magazine, No. 92, 1970, p. 264). The only piece marked as being made in the Bergantini workshop which is known to have survived also has a berettino-ground border with grotesques (A bowl decorated with Marcus Curtius, which bears the inscription ‘made in Faenza in the workshop of Maestro Piero Bergantini, 17 June 1529’, see Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti, Thesaurus di opera della tradizione di Faenza, Faenza, 1998, pp. 351-355).
Armorial shields are usually painted at the center of Faenza dishes of this period, and it is unusual for the arms to be incorporated into the border, with a pictorial scene at the center. A Faenza armorial plate made two years earlier in 1535 for Niklas Praun of Nuremberg also incorporates a central istoriato scene with his arms on the border (In the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Dortmund (C6069), illustrated by Timothy Wilson, Italian Maiolica and Europe, Oxford, 2017, p. 18, Fig. 9). A large armorial dish with a robbiana around the well and the impaled arms of Strozzi and Ridolfi families is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (See Timothy Wilson, Maiolica: Italian Renaissance Ceramics, New York, 2016, pp. 148-149, no. 44).
PROPERTY RETURNED TO THE HEIRS OF FRITZ GUTMANN
More than a century ago, the following maiolica lots were part of the famed Gutmann collection, formed by the German banker Eugen Gutmann (1840 - 1925). Apart from maiolica, the collection included Old Master paintings, Renaissance jewelry, gold-mounted hardstone objects, bronzes, watches, miniatures and 18th century gold boxes. After his passing, son Fritz Gutmann (1886 - 1944), was chosen to administer the Eugen Gutmann collection trust on behalf of himself and his six siblings.
Eugen solidified the Gutmann family legacy when, at age 32, he co-founded the Dresdner Bank which became one of the leading financial institutions in Germany. Fritz, in his turn, founded a private bank in Amsterdam after the First World War, and settled his family nearby in ‘Bosbeek’, a beautiful historic home with doors and ceilings decorated by the celebrated 18th-century painter Jacob de Wit. In the 1920s Gutmann’s art collection grew considerably, with a special focus on Renaissance works of art, such as the present six maiolica lots, as well as paintings by the likes of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Sandro Botticelli. As political tensions grew in the 1930s, Fritz and his wife Louise, who were Jewish, insisted that their children remain safely in England and Italy, but they unfortunately did not leave the Netherlands themselves. Following the Occupation in 1940 and after a prolonged period of house arrest during which Nazi agents gradually stripped ‘Bosbeek’ of its possessions, the Gutmanns were arrested in 1943 and tragically did not survive in concentration camps, dying the following year.
A detailed account of the family history and the history of the Gutmann collection is given by Simon Goodman in The Orpheus Clock: The Search for my Family’s Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis, Simon and Schuster, 2015.
How the present group of restituted maiolica wares came to enter the collection of Johan Willem Frederiks (1889-1962) is unclear, but Frederik’s daughter loaned, then donated, the works to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, where they sat for decades, their connection to the Gutmann family unknown for much of their time there. These maiolica artworks were restituted to the heirs of Fritz Gutmann in 2022.
These six maiolica lots from the Gutmann collection represent an opportunity to acquire important renaissance artworks which have not been on the open market for well over half a century. The group focuses on four of the principal maiolica centres of 16th century Italy; Urbino, Gubbio, Faenza and Deruta. 1530s Urbino maiolica was dominated by two extremely influential painters, Nicola da Urbino, who was both a painter and workshop owner, and Francesco Xanto Avelli. The dish painted with The Banquet of the Gods is very probably painted by Nicola, and the signed and dated plate painted by Xanto with The Sword of Damocles is one of six known pieces painted with this subject, and it has the addition of lustre. The Urbino plate painted with the birth of Castor and Pollux is from a slightly later period and is most probably by the accomplished but anonymous painter who created the famous ‘Punic War Series’. Only a few pottery centres had the special technology of applying iridescent lustred decoration to their wares, and this is admirably represented by the Gubbio coppa painted with a flag bearer, which is probably by Francesco Urbini, and the Deruta ‘bella donna’ dish, a charming and fine example of its type.