ANDREOLI, Giorgio

The dish is signed and dated on the reverse. The decoration is taken from three engravings, one after Raphael.

Born near Lake Maggiore in the late 1470s, Giorgio di Pietro Andreoli moved to Gubbio in central Italy around 1490, where he founded and directed his own maiolica workshop. Because of his great skill in the difficult luster technique, Andreoli was frequently hired to embellish the wares of other workshops, an unusual practice. After adorning these works of other masters, he often signed the pieces himself. So famous did he become that the Duke of Urbino granted him citizenship and exempted him from paying taxes and duties.

The picture on the dish is a rare illustration of the myth of Cyparissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, arranged within a Mediterranean landscape. The composition is comprised of three crucial moments from the fable culminating with Cyparissus’s metamorphosis into a cypress tree at bottom left.

Beginning around 1490, Giorgio Andreoli directed a maiolica workshop in the town of Gubbio in Central Italy. A favourite of the Duke of Urbino as well as Pope Leo X, Maestro Giorgio was renowned for his unusual lustre technique that applied additional metallic colourings prior to the second firing, thus enriching and enlivening each piece’s vibrancy.