Armorial Dish with the Flaying of Marsyas

A shallow armorial dish painted in Urbino in the mid-1520s with the arms of the Calini family of Brescia and, around the rim, the flaying of the satyr Marsyas from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is one of eleven known survivors of a dinner service made for a family of jurists rather than princes, now scattered across five countries. It is catalogued to Nicola da Urbino, one of the two painters who defined istoriato maiolica in the 1520s, but the man himself signed almost nothing and was not correctly identified by name until 1986.

The dish's real subject, for a record like this one, is not only Marsyas. It is what it takes to attribute an unsigned object made in a workshop town where two of the greatest painters of the age, Nicola da Urbino and Francesco Xanto Avelli, were working side by side in the very years this plate was painted, one of them leaving almost no trace of his hand in writing and the other not yet signing his own work at all.

What it is

A shallow dish of tin-glazed earthenware, 41.4 centimetres across and only 5.7 centimetres deep, made to sit on a table rather than hang on a wall. At its center is a painted shield bearing the arms of the Calini family of Brescia: a blue field crossed by a gold ladder with a small forked white pennant threaded between two of its rungs, held by putti. Around that shield runs a narrow band of bianco sopra bianco, opaque white ornament raised on the white tin glaze itself, a refinement particular to the best Urbino ware of this period and easy to miss in photographs taken at any distance. The wide outer rim carries the istoriato scene proper: a continuous narrative band showing four moments from a single myth, read left to right around the circumference of the plate.

Nothing about the object announces a maker's name. There is no signature, no monogram, no painted date, no verse on the reverse of the kind that later Urbino painters, Francesco Xanto Avelli above all, made routine. Everything known about who painted it, and when, is inferred from the painting itself, from its place in a larger service, and from what has been reconstructed about the workshop that produced it.

The myth on the rim

The scenes come from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book VI: the contest of skill and hubris between the satyr Marsyas and the god Apollo. On the far left Athena is shown playing the pipes she invented and then discarded, having noticed in a reflection how the instrument distorted her face. Marsyas finds the discarded pipes and takes up the skill Athena renounced. He is then shown in a musical contest with Apollo, playing before the god on the pipes against Apollo's lyre. On the far right comes the consequence: a triumphant Apollo, having won, ties the satyr to a tree and flays him alive as punishment for daring to challenge a god. Ovid gives Marsyas a single line of protest as the knife does its work, asking why he is being torn from himself; nothing on the dish quotes it, but the painter has chosen to show the moment of punishment rather than stopping at the contest itself, and the sequence only makes sense as a warning against exactly the kind of overreach Marsyas is guilty of.

The figures are not invented from life. They are adapted from woodcuts in an illustrated edition of Bonsignori's Italian translation of the Metamorphoses, printed in Venice at the end of the fifteenth century and reprinted into the first years of the sixteenth, a book that supplied compositions to istoriato painters across Urbino, Castel Durante and Faenza for a generation. Painters working from the same printed source repeatedly is one of the reasons attribution in this field is so difficult: two dishes with visibly related compositions can be the work of two different hands who simply opened the same book.

The subject itself was a common choice for a dining service and not an idiosyncratic one. A myth about the punishment of pride, told across the rim of a dish that would have been set before guests at table, carried an unmissable moral for anyone eating from it: know your place, and do not compete with your betters. Nothing in the sources consulted suggests the Calini chose the subject for any more specific or private reason than that ordinary and very legible moral function, which a family of jurists, professionally in the business of judgment and rank, had every reason to want repeated at their own table.

How istoriato ware was made

A maiolica workshop of this period employed roughly eight people under a master potter, each with a distinct task: digging and refining clay, throwing or moulding the body, mixing and firing the kiln, preparing the tin glaze, and painting. Tin oxide, the ingredient that gave the ware its opaque white ground, was an imported and genuinely expensive material, which is part of why maiolica cost more than ordinary pottery and why an armorial commission was a substantial outlay for the family that ordered it, not a routine purchase.

Painting was done directly onto the dry, unfired tin glaze, a surface that absorbed pigment immediately and forgave almost no correction; a painter had to commit to a line the first time he laid it down. This is worth stating plainly because it bears directly on attribution: the confident, fluent draughtsmanship visible in finished istoriato ware is not a stylistic flourish that can be faked by a slow or careful hand working from a model. It required real facility, which is one of the reasons connoisseurs treat this Urbino production of the 1520s, unsigned as almost all of it is, as the work of a small number of identifiable, highly skilled individuals rather than an anonymous trade output.

A painter without a name

The single strangest fact about the artist this dish is attributed to is that his real name was not known for roughly four hundred and fifty years. Pieces inscribed simply Nicola da Urbino, a working name tied to a place rather than a family, had accumulated around a reconstructed personality that early twentieth-century scholarship called Nicola Pellipario, a name built on a documentary connection to an unrelated family of that surname. It was treated as settled fact in the literature for decades.

In 1986 the Italian scholar Franco Negroni published an article whose title translates as Nicolo Pellipario: Phantom Ceramicist, demonstrating that the Pellipario identity did not hold up against the Urbino archives. The painter actually recorded as running his own workshop in Urbino from 1520, called maestro in the documents, was Nicola di Gabriele Sbraghe, also given as Sbraga. The Getty's own collection database states the position plainly: until the 1980s, when he was identified in the Urbino archives as Nicola di Gabriele Sbraghe, the identity of the man who signed his works Nicola da Urbino remained unknown. Every label on every museum wall bearing his name, including the one attached to this dish, is downstream of that 1986 correction.

What survives about him beyond the name is thin. He is called maestro and workshop owner in the Urbino records from 1520; he died at the end of 1537 or in January 1538. Almost nothing else of his personal life, his training, or his family is documented. The entire modern reputation of Nicola da Urbino, sometimes called the Raphael of maiolica painting for the sophistication and restraint of his figure drawing, rests on a corpus assembled by connoisseurship around a name that scholarship spent most of the twentieth century getting wrong.

The problem of the unsigned hand

Nicola da Urbino was not working alone in Urbino in the 1520s. Francesco Xanto Avelli da Rovigo, a painter and poet who arrived in the city around 1521 or 1522, worked in close proximity to him through exactly the years this dish was painted, drawing on the same printed sources and, for part of the decade, using the pipes of Xanto's own initials as F.R. rather than his full name. Xanto is not known to have signed and dated a work before 1530; the weight of scholarly opinion nonetheless attributes unsigned work back to around 1524 to his hand, without unanimous agreement on which unsigned pieces those are.

The standard modern attempt to sort the two painters' output is J.V.G. Mallet's 2007 study Nicola da Urbino and Francesco Xanto Avelli, published in the journal Faenza, which catalogues roughly 128 dishes given to Nicola either as painter or as the source of the design. Later work in Nicola's accepted corpus, from about 1528 onward, shows warmer flesh tones than the cooler, more blue-dominated palette of his earlier 1520s pieces, a stylistic marker scholars use to help separate hands and periods within an unsigned production. This dish, dated only to the mid-1520s, falls before that later shift and inside the very years when Nicola and Xanto's work is hardest to tell apart.

Two things should be said plainly and separately here, because conflating them would be exactly the kind of error this record exists to avoid. First, the general difficulty of distinguishing Nicola's early hand from Xanto's is real, published, and named: it is the subject of Mallet's monograph and is acknowledged across the museum and dealer literature on Urbino maiolica of this decade. Second, no source located for this record singles out this specific dish, or the Calini service it belongs to, for an individual reattribution dispute between the two painters, or for a formal workshop qualification such as circle of or attributed to; the Getty catalogues it to Nicola da Urbino without a hedge. The honest position is that the dish sits inside a genuinely and publicly contested zone of connoisseurship without itself being a documented flashpoint in that argument, and a future cataloguer with access to Mallet's full 2007 appendix, which was not obtainable for this record, may be able to say more.

Nicola's other clients

Whoever he was, the painter given this name worked for the most prominent collectors of his generation. Around 1524 he supplied a maiolica service bearing the joint arms of Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, and her late husband Francesco II Gonzaga; a plate from it is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He later painted for her son Federico II Gonzaga, first Duke of Mantua: the Metropolitan Museum holds a large dish from around 1521 showing Pope Leo X presenting Federico with the baton of Captain General of the Church, and the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin holds further pieces from a Gonzaga service depicting the foundation myth of Mantua and the rape of Europa.

Set against that princely clientele, the Calini commission represents a different, and historically more interesting, tier of patron. The Calini were jurists, not rulers; a wealthy professional Brescian family buying the same quality of istoriato ware, from the same painter, that a Marchioness of Mantua was buying, is itself a small piece of social history about how far up the market for painted narrative tableware had spread by the 1520s.

The Calini service and its dispersal

Eleven pieces of the Calini service are known today, according to the Musee national de la Renaissance at the Chateau d'Ecouen, which holds one of them: a dish showing the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Five more are in National Museums Scotland, forming the largest single surviving group, including scenes of Perseus and Andromeda, Saint George and the Dragon, and the punishment of Phalaris. The British Museum holds a dish from the same service showing the musical contest of Pan and Apollo, a different scene from the one on the Getty's dish though drawn from the same broad vein of Ovidian subject matter. The Metropolitan Museum's example, showing Paris killing Achilles, entered that museum's collection in 1884, decades before Nicola da Urbino's correct name was even known and long before the Getty entered the market for maiolica at all, which shows the service was already broken apart and circulating in the trade in the nineteenth century.

No source consulted for this record accounts for how or when the service was first dispersed, or what happened to any of the remaining pieces of what would originally have been a much larger set; a full dinner service of this class regularly ran to several dozen individual pieces, of which eleven survivors, however geographically scattered, still represent only a fraction.

What is still unresolved

Two different kinds of gap sit inside this record, and they should not be mistaken for one another. The first is a plain provenance gap: nobody has published where this dish was for roughly four and a half centuries between the Calini household and its appearance with a London dealer in 1984. The second is a methodological gap: the attribution to Nicola da Urbino, though stated without qualification by the Getty, rests on a body of connoisseurship that its own leading scholar has spent decades refining and that remains, by the nature of unsigned workshop production, an argument rather than a settled fact for pieces of exactly this date. Neither gap has been closed by anything found in the course of researching this record, and neither should be quietly smoothed over in the writing of it.