The Medieval art dealer Sam Fogg is hoping to change people’s perceptions of early Italian maiolica with a selling exhibition, opening at the London gallery on 8 May, of pieces made between 1275 and 1500. The show and accompanying catalogue features a collection of around 45 objects, ranging in price from £10,000 to £100,000, that Fogg spent the better part of a decade assembling.
According to the gallery’s Matthew Reeves, these early, tin-glazed pottery pieces are not mere precursors to better-known High Renaissance examples. Unlike Medieval paintings that have faded with time, the colours on early maiolica are as true as when artists first decorated them and so offer an important insight into the Italian Medieval palette. “They are like Medieval paintings in 3D,” he says. Although early wares were prized by collectors a century ago, a shift in preference for later Renaissance istoriato maiolica—in which mythical and historical scenes are depicted in a grand narrative—has meant that maiolica made in the age of Botticelli, Donatello and Pisanello have been overlooked and left out of authoritative surveys. Reeves adds that much of the British Museum’s collection of early maiolica was damaged during the Second World War. “In this case, you can go to a commercial gallery and see a better collection than in a museum,” he says.
Highlights from the show include a blue-and-white albarello (drug jar) decorated with an owl and stork from Montelupo (around 1430-50), and an inkstand with the figures of the Four Virtues (around 1480-90) that was formerly in the collections of the Museo Guidi in Faenza and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. A symposium devoted to the works will be held at London’s Royal Institution on 5 May.
• Maiolica before Raphael, Sam Fogg, London, 8 May-16 June