An Important Italian Renaissance Majolica Plate with the Legend of Perseus and Andromeda, c. 1535-1545, Duchy of Urbino, in the orbit of Nicola da Urbino (known active 1520-1538) and/or Francesco Xanto Avelli (active probably c. 1524-1542), possibly by one of the painters of majolica for Cardinal Antonio Pucci, c. 1540, tin-glazed earthenware, unsigned, height 1 1/2 in. (4 cm.), diameter 7 in. (18 cm.) Note: This beautiful small plate (or more properly "broad-rimmed bowl": the shape is close to that of R9 in Arthur Rackham, Italian Majolica, London, 1963, or L11 in Johanna Lessmann, Italienische Majolika, Braunschweig, 1979) has a plain cream-colored reverse, with the standard Urbino yellow bands on the foot, flange contour, and edge. The narrative or istoriato painting on the front depicts Andromeda chained to a tree on an isolated rock, the sea-dragon threatening her, and Perseus coming to her rescue by decapitating Medusa."The brilliant, deeply saturated palette with emphasis on yellow, gold and brown suggests that of the later works of Nicola da Urbino, "the Raphael of majolica painting" (Timothy Wilson, Ceramic Art of the Italian Renaissance, London, 1987, p. 44). Indeed this painter's distribution of figures (loosely following a woodcut in the 1497 Venice edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 4, fol. 34 verso) interestingly parallels Nicola's rendering of the same protagonists, on a broad-rimmed bowl of c. 1525 from the "Ladder Service" for Luigi Calini of Brescia (Wilson 1987, no. 56, citing two other majolica paintings by Nicola of this same myth)."This plate's distinctive enlargement of the arches supporting the standard seaside town in the middle distance, however, as well as the edges on the banks in the foreground (paralleling a Xanto dish dated 1539, Christie's London, 2 July 1979, lot 38), and especially its fragmentary stick fencing, are all elements recurring in the work of the other principal Urbino majolica painter of this same period, Francesco Xanto Avelli (Wilson 1987, nos. 71, 73, 192, all of c. 1530-1531); and, exactly as it is here, that curious broken fencing is brought into the extreme foreground, in front of another wide-arched town, on a dish dated 1535 attributed to Giulio da Urbino (ibid., no. 99). The anonymous artist of the plate being offered here is very closely related in compositions, foliage details, and physiognomies to one of the Urbino painters of the Rabenhaupt-Lamparter service (before 1538: Wendy Watson, Italian Renaissance Majolica, London, 1986, p. 183, no. 108), above all in the idiosyncratic device of a completely dark cave surmounted by a cloud-like tuffet issuing stunted branches (cf. Wilson 1987, no. 210, illustrating an almost exact replication of this cave, tuft, and branches, in reverse)."The best overall cognate to the present lot, though, is an Urbino plate for Antonio Pucci of Florence (made Cardinal 1531, died 1544; ibid., no. 201): it presents variants of this same cave, these faces, these highly idiosyncratic bushes, these bank profiles, and, most tellingly, these same paired tree-trunks of contrasting colors, as well as this same unusual concentration on the female nude. It seems likely, therefore, that this is an Urbino-decorated dish approximately of the later 1530s, by one of the majolica painters associated with the marked services named above. We are most grateful to Dr. Timothy Wilson of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for his generous help in the placement and dating of this lot."