# Medici Porcelain Ewer > Manufacture des Medicis (Casino di San Marco workshop, under the patronage of Francesco I de' Medici) - Louvre catalogue bracket 1585-1600 (fourth quarter of the 16th century); the Casino di San Marco workshop's documented active production window is c. 1575-1587 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/medici-porcelain-manufactory/medici-porcelain-louvre/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-05 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Manufacture des Medicis (Casino di San Marco workshop, under the patronage of Francesco I de' Medici) - **Date:** Louvre catalogue bracket 1585-1600 (fourth quarter of the 16th century); the Casino di San Marco workshop's documented active production window is c. 1575-1587 - **Medium:** Soft-paste (fritware) porcelain, tin-opacified lead glaze, painted decoration in underglaze cobalt blue - **Dimensions:** Height 20.5 cm; diameter 11.3 cm - **Object type:** Ceramic - **Period:** Italian Renaissance, late sixteenth century, Grand Duchy of Tuscany - **Current location:** Musee du Louvre, Paris, Departement des Objets d'art du Moyen Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A small blue-and-white ewer, 20.5 centimetres tall, made in Florence in the last quarter of the sixteenth century at the world's first successful European porcelain workshop, a furnace built inside Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici's private laboratory-palace, the Casino di San Marco. It is one of perhaps sixty to seventy such pieces to survive anywhere, and one of the smaller number that still carries the workshop's own painted mark, the dome of Florence Cathedral over a capital F.The Louvre holds it, and three related but distinct pieces, in the Departement des Objets d'art. This one was bought by the French state in 1885 for 3,500 francs from an otherwise undocumented owner; the other three came in two years earlier as part of the bequest of Baron Jean-Charles Davillier, a historian who had written one of the first serious studies of the factory's output. The recipe the workshop used was never written down in a form that survived Francesco's death in 1587, and was only pieced back together through chemical analysis of the surviving pieces themselves, most recently by Raman spectroscopy carried out directly on museum objects in the early 2000s.Where the piece stood before 1885, and who "Pennelli" was, is not recorded in any source consulted for this record. That gap is honest rather than filled in, in keeping with how little is documented about almost anything Medici porcelain touched between the 1772 dispersal of the Tuscan grand-ducal stock and its slow re-collection by nineteenth-century connoisseurs like Davillier. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1575-1587-1587** Casino di San Marco workshop, under Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany `[documented]` (manufacture) Made at the experimental porcelain furnace inside the Casino di San Marco, Florence, during the workshop's active production period. Production is documented to have ceased at or shortly after Francesco I's death on 19 October 1587, with no secure evidence of further manufacture afterward. The Louvre's own catalogue bracket for this specific piece, 1585-1600, runs slightly past that date; this record treats the wider date as the museum's cataloguing convention rather than evidence of continued production, since no source consulted documents porcelain manufacture at the Casino after 1587. - **1587** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, location or event is documented for this specific piece between its manufacture and its appearance in the hands of a previous owner recorded by the Louvre only by the surname "Pennelli" ahead of the 1885 purchase. Whether it passed through the Medici grand-ducal collections themselves, was dispersed at the 1772 Palazzo Vecchio auction of Tuscan porcelain stock along with much of the rest of the surviving production, or left Florence by another route, is not stated in any source consulted. - **-1885** "Pennelli" (otherwise unidentified in the sources consulted) `[unknown]` (prior ownership) The Louvre's own provenance note for OA 2734 names only a prior owner or vendor recorded as "Pennelli," with no first name, nationality or further identification given. This record does not guess at who that was. - **1885-present** Musee du Louvre, Paris (French state) `[documented]` (purchase) Purchased by the French state on 26 February 1885 for 3,500 francs. The Louvre's own record cites the acquisition file as AN 20144787/9. The piece has remained in the Departement des Objets d'art since, and was on display in Room 516 of the Richelieu wing when photographed in 2009; the Louvre's online collection database records it as not currently on display. ## Open questions - Who was "Pennelli," the owner or vendor from whom the French state purchased this ewer in 1885? No further identification is given in the sources consulted. - Where was the piece, and in whose hands, between the end of documented production in 1587 and its appearance in the Pennelli provenance immediately before 1885? No source consulted bridges this gap. - Does the Louvre's own catalogue date bracket of 1585-1600 for this piece reflect a real possibility of porcelain production continuing briefly past Francesco I's death in 1587, or is it simply a broad cataloguing convention? The sources consulted do not resolve this directly. - What is the correct current count of surviving Medici porcelain pieces worldwide? The Metropolitan Museum's published figure of 59 sits against older secondary summaries of 60 to 70; this record does not adjudicate between them. - Who, beyond Bernardo Buontalenti, Flaminio Fontana and Jacques Bylivelt, actually worked the clay, mixed the frit and fired the kiln at the Casino di San Marco? The great majority of hands involved are not named in any source consulted. - Did this piece ever form part of the Medici grand-ducal collections directly, or did it leave Florence by some other route entirely? No documented link between the object and the 1587 or 1588 Medici inventories has been identified. ## Sources - [1] Musee du Louvre, Louvre Collections online database, "Chevrette ou aiguiere ovoide a une anse et un bec," OA 2734. - [2] Musee du Louvre, Louvre Collections online database, "Vase a boire ovoide a deux anses surmonte d'un long col," OA 3101. - [3] Musee du Louvre, Louvre Collections online database, "Gourde a deux passants," OA 3102. - [4] Musee du Louvre, Louvre Collections online database, "Vase piriforme a col etroit et deux anses," OA 3104. - [5] Wikipedia, "Medici porcelain," consolidating Vasari's and the Venetian ambassador Andrea Gussoni's contemporary accounts, the 1588 post-mortem inventory, and Metropolitan Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum curatorial descriptions. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with Spallanzani (1994), Cora and Fanfani (1986) and Liverani (1936) directly. - [6] Wikipedia, "Casino Mediceo di San Marco," for the building's construction under Bernardo Buontalenti (1568-1574) and its later use as a scientific and manufacturing complex. Tertiary source. - [7] Wikipedia, "Studiolo of Francesco I," for the iconographic programme of Francesco's private study in the Palazzo Vecchio, including Giovanni Stradano's painting of alchemists and Giovanni Maria Butteri's painting of a glassworks among its wall panels. Tertiary source. - [8] Colomban, Ph., Milande, V. and Lucas, H., "On-site Raman analysis of Medici porcelain," Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, vol. 35, no. 1 (2004), pp. 68-72. - [9] "Casino di San Marco: 'The House of Nature'," Cabinet magazine, on the building's laboratories for alchemy, glassmaking, porcelain and pharmacy under Francesco I and their survival into the seventeenth century. - [10] Wikimedia Commons, File:Medici porcelain with surface detail Florence 1575 1587.jpg, photograph by Wikimedia user World Imaging, own work, photographed at the Louvre, 2009, categorized by Commons directly under Louvre inventory number OA 2734, CC BY-SA 3.0. - [11] Wikimedia Commons, File:Medici porcelain ewer 1575 1587.jpg, photograph by Wikimedia user World Imaging, own work, photographed at the Louvre, 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0. - [12] Wikimedia Commons, File:Medici porcelain gourd 1575 1587.jpg, photograph by Wikimedia user World Imaging, own work, photographed at the Louvre, 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0. - [13] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Ewer (Brocca)," Medici Porcelain Manufactory, accession 17.190.2046, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917. Open access, public domain. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.