OR some time past Italian fifteenth-century maiolica has been much sought after, and very justly; it would appear, however, that, so far, it is more admired than understood. Without doubt several works have been devoted to this subject. But if we attempt to divide it up into several groups, the various classifications seem neither very clear nor very definitive. ¶ The three druggists’ jars which have just been acquired by the Louvre will help in a certain degree to fix the date and to determine the centre of activity of one of the factories which we are trying to reconstitute at the present moment—a factory which Mr. Fraschetti has made his special study (in L’ Arte, 1898), as also Mr. Stettiner has done.[107] Articles from this factory are characterized by a decoration of long, large leaves, curving back at the end, half white and half painted, the veining only being indicated on the back side; these leaves are intermingled with a peculiar style of decoration, in which the eyes of peacocks’ feathers are presented together with large, round, blue and yellow flowers, standing out from a background of slender blue scroll-pattern. The principal pieces of this ware have been found at Rome. They are notably the druggists’ jars of the hospital of St. John Lateran, those of the apothecary Bruti, near the bridge of S. Angelo, the paving tiles in one of the chapels of the church of S. Maria del Popolo, and those in the church of S. Maria della Verità at Viterbo.[108] From this fact it has been concluded that this factory, which sprang more or less directly from Faenza, and which produced a great deal, must have been situated in Rome; and it has been proposed to call it, at least provisionally, the Roman factory. ¶ The three albarelli in the Louvre belong, as the accompanying figures will show, to this class, for they are all decorated on one side with the large peculiar leaves. The most important of these jars, from an artistic point of view, bears on the front side the bust of a beardless man, which will at once recall similar figures on the Viterbo pavement. Before the face waves a streamer,[109] upon which the maker (who was evidently very illiterate) has traced an inscription, which does not seem to convey any meaning whatever:—AR ·IERIN ·RI · N · E · I · R · E. The two other jars are, truth to tell, but very mediocre specimens, but they are of great interest to the archaeologist, for they are decorated with armorial shields which furnish us with some very useful information. On one of these shields are quartered the arms of Aragon and Jerusalem; on the other are the same arms parti per pale with those of Milan. These armorial bearings[110] (very distinct though slightly simplified by the maker, as is generally the case) tell us for whom these jars were manufactured; they belonged, in fact, to Alfonzo II of Aragon, king of Naples and Sicily, who reigned one year (from 1494 to 1495) and died in the latter year at the age of forty-seven. He married in 1465 Hippolyta Maria Sforza (daughter of Francesco Sforza I, duke of Milan, and Bianca-Maria Visconti), who died at Naples in 1484.[111] These albarelli, which bear the coats-of-arms of the king and queen, must have been made between 1465 and 1484, or at the latest before 1495.
Therefore they were made for a Neapolitan prince, and, furthermore, they come from Palermo.[112] This would agree very well with the hypothesis of Messrs. Fraschetti and Stettiner, according to whom all the pieces in this style would be of Roman origin. It would seem natural indeed that Neapolitan sovereigns should address themselves to a factory in Rome which was much nearer than those in Faenza or Florence. But, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that, even before the end of the fifteenth century, fanciers sent their orders to very distant factories, and also that the centres of ceramic industry were much more numerous in those days than is generally supposed.
J. J. MARQUET DE VASSELOT.
The latest acquisitions consist, in the first place, of two large landscapes by Salomon van Ruysdael. The photographs reproduced avoid the necessity of a detailed description. One of them is from a collection at Montpellier, the other from an Austrian collection. They both present large views of nature, very peaceful and very simple, banks of wide and sluggish rivers such as the first generation of the Dutch seventeenth-century landscape men loved to depict. The museum at Rotterdam possesses a picture by this same van Ruysdael; and we know that his contemporary, Jan van Goyen, who was his rival rather than his master, also took a special delight in painting the environs of that city on the banks of the Maas, with its great sheet of water spread calmly and majestically under the sky laden with grey or copper-coloured clouds. Do we find ourselves here in the same environs of Dordrecht? Probably; although it is impossible to assert this absolutely. ¶ One thing is certain, which is that the workmanship of these two pictures very closely approaches that of the other paintings attributed by modern critics to the uncle of the great Jacob van Ruysdael, as it does that of many other landscapes of that period. Although they do not descend to the almost monochrome appearance of certain van Goyens, brown and yellowish tones predominate, and a certain and rather monotonous uniformity stands revealed, notably in the clump of trees that forms the centre of one of the two compositions. But the moist and cloudy skies are filled with light: one, in the landscape with the two towers, has gaps through which appears a pale blue, with rosy streaks in the direction of the horizon; the other is a little greyer and sadder. A whole crowd of figures, all standing out clearly against the background, fills the bank and the river itself, on which barges are carrying herds and shepherds from one side of the river to the other. A group of horsemen of quality, in the landscape with the church, reminds us very closely of those which we see in the Halt at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This last picture is dated 1660. But it is much more complicated in composition and more compact in execution than are our two landscapes at the Louvre. The latter seem to belong to a less advanced period of the artist’s career, and are doubtless nearer the Pesth landscape (1631), the first that is known to us after the artist’s registry on the roll of the gild of St. Luke at Haarlem. In any case, these are two very fine museum-pieces, and most worthily represent the earlier of the two Ruysdaels at the Louvre, where as yet he was hardly represented at all, beside those unquestionable master-pieces of his nephew, the Dykes, the Thicket, and the landscape known as the Coup de soleil. ¶ As for the French picture which is also newly hung, this is the portrait of a woman, signed ‘L. Tocqué, 1793.’ It was exhibited at the Salon of the same year, and represents a certain Dame Danger, a perfectly unknown lady. It was, therefore, no iconographic interest that drew the attention of the keepers of the Louvre to this portrait, but rather the intrinsic charm of this very intimate and searching picture of a woman of the fashionable middle-class of the eighteenth century and the merit of its very simple and harmonious execution. Jean Louis Tocqué was already abundantly represented at the Louvre, but chiefly by those official portraits of artist-academicians, of princes and princesses, which made his fortune, which sent him as far abroad as Sweden, Russia and Denmark, but which perhaps charm us less to-day than do those simple and discreet figures which make the society of the eighteenth century itself live once more before our eyes. This picture has been hung not far from the supposed portrait of Madame de Graffigny and from that of a man unknown, by the same artist, and these three figures of unknown persons, to whom we cannot help ascribing a wealth of wit and intelligence, form a charming trio together. ¶ The new-comer is engaged in parfilage or ‘unravelling.’ This occupation was greatly in fashion at the time; it formed an easy work which kept the fingers busy without interfering with conversation. The gold threads were separated from the silks of some piece of lace-work or embroidery and rolled on a special shuttle (we have preserved some that are marvels of delicate carving). Neither the eyes nor the mind needed to be kept fixed on this light labour, as we see in the present case, where the lady, who is no longer in her first youth under her powdered hair, but who still wears a seductively young appearance, looks up at her visitor or interlocutor with a calm and gentle gaze. She wears a grey fur cloak over a vieux-rose skirt; and the whole forms with the blues of the sofa on which she is seated a rare and delicate harmony which is one of the principal qualities of this picture.
PAUL VITRY.
In 1902, the Louvre acquired from a French collector residing in Cairo a piece of Arabic copper incrusted with gold and silver, the beauty and rarity of which deserve every attention. This piece is the lid or cover of a koursi, used sometimes as a stool on which the candlesticks are placed in a mosque, sometimes as a box to contain the Koran. To prove the rarity of this object I need only mention that no more than two such stools and one box of metal incrusted with gold and silver are known. These two famous objects bear the names of the Sultans Kalaoun and Mohammed el Nasser, and are preserved at the museum of Arabic art in Cairo. ¶ The koursi cover acquired by the Louvre is hexagonal in shape, but must originally have been circular, and formed a plate engraved and incrusted with silver about the middle of the thirteenth century. This hypothesis is confirmed by an examination of the reverse side, which allows of an engraved decoration that would not have been necessary in a real koursi top fixed to the body of the article itself. The centre, consisting of a rose with various designs, and the surrounding frieze, containing an interrupted inscription, give a name—Al Ganâb—and the following indication: ‘Belonging to Malik al Nasir.’ This title was common to several sultans in Egypt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and does not convey an exact indication of the period. ¶ The inscription is interrupted by six medallions. Their shape and the pointed arabesques in which they terminate seem characteristic of the thirteenth century. ¶ Later, in the fourteenth century, the plate must have been turned and cut out into a hexagon intended to serve as a koursi cover. The engraved decoration then added to it is executed with the greatest vigour and clearness, and is rich in incrustations in gold and silver. In the centre is a long inscription with radiating letters giving the customary titles of the contemporary sultan, the sacred names of God, the great, the sole, the glorious. This fine radiating inscription is peculiar, through its character and the decorative importance of the letters, to the art of the Egyptian engravers on copper of the fourteenth century.
GASTON MIGEON.