# Armorial Dish with the Flaying of Marsyas > Nicola di Gabriele Sbraghe (or Sbraga), known as Nicola da Urbino - mid-1520s > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/nicola-da-urbino/getty-armorial-dish-flaying-of-marsyas/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-11 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Nicola di Gabriele Sbraghe (or Sbraga), known as Nicola da Urbino - **Date:** mid-1520s - **Medium:** Tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica), istoriato-painted with bianco sopra bianco (white-on-white) border decoration - **Dimensions:** 5.7 x 41.4 cm (2 1/4 x 16 5/16 in.) - **Object type:** Ceramic - **Period:** Italian Renaissance, Urbino, 1520s - **Current location:** J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## 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. - **mid-1520s** The Calini family of Brescia `[documented]` (commission) The dish bears the arms of the Calini, a family of jurists from Brescia, at its center, and belongs to a dinner service made for them in Urbino. The Musee national de la Renaissance, which holds a companion piece from the same service, proposes the commission may have marked the birth of Muzio Calini, son of Luigi Calini, in 1525; this occasion is offered by the museum as a possibility, not a documented fact, and no contract or family record confirming it has been located in the sources consulted. - **mid-1520s-by 1984** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner is documented between the Calini commission and the dish's appearance with a London dealer in 1984, a gap of roughly four and a half centuries. A companion piece from the same service, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was already in a New York collection by 1884, which shows the service was broken up and in the trade at least a century before this piece surfaces in the record; nothing found ties the two histories together. - **by 1984-1984** Rainer Zietz Limited, London `[documented]` (sale) Sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 by the London dealer Rainer Zietz Limited, a firm dealing in European sculpture, ceramics, glass and silver. This sale supplied a substantial part of the Museum's founding group of Italian maiolica, published in 1988 and again, expanded, in 2002 as the Museum's standing catalogue of the collection. The price paid has not been published in the sources consulted. - **1984-present** J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles `[documented]` (acquisition) Accessioned as 84.DE.117. As of the most recent archived description of the object consulted for this record, the dish was on view at the Getty Center, Museum North Pavilion, Gallery N101; current display status was not independently reverified at time of writing. ## Open questions - Where was the dish between its creation in the mid-1520s and its appearance with a London dealer in 1984? No owner is documented for roughly four and a half centuries. - Was this specific dish painted by Nicola da Urbino himself, or by an assistant in the workshop he is recorded as owning from 1520? The Getty's attribution carries no such qualification, but no piece-by-piece published discussion of the Calini service against Mallet's 2007 attribution criteria was located for this record. - Did the Calini commission genuinely mark the 1525 birth of Muzio Calini, as the Musee national de la Renaissance proposes, or was it ordered for some other family occasion? The museum itself frames this as a possibility, not a documented fact. - How many pieces of the original Calini service remain unidentified? A dinner service of this class typically ran to several dozen pieces; eleven known survivors, however widely admired, are very unlikely to be the complete set. - What price did the Getty pay Rainer Zietz Limited in 1984? This figure has not been published in the sources consulted. - When and through whose hands did the service first break apart? The Metropolitan Museum's piece was already in New York by 1884, which places the dispersal in the nineteenth century at the latest, but no source found identifies who broke the service up or when. - The exact publication year of Negroni's Nicolo Pellipario: Ceramista fantasma is given inconsistently across sources (Wikipedia cites 1985; a WorldCat-style search independently found the journal issue Notizie da Palazzo Albani 14 dated 1986) and the original article itself could not be fetched to resolve it; likewise Mallet's 2007 Faenza catalogue of roughly 128 Nicola da Urbino dishes is widely cited in secondary literature but could not be independently verified against the original journal text, so the specific dish-count figure has been left out of this record rather than asserted on secondary authority alone. ## Sources - [1] J. Paul Getty Museum, 'Armorial Dish with the Flaying of Marsyas,' Museum Collection Online, object 84.DE.117. - [2] J. Paul Getty Museum, 'Armorial Dish with the Flaying of Marsyas,' archived object page with full curatorial description, via Wayback Machine. - [3] J. Paul Getty Museum, artist biography for Nicola di Gabriele Sbraghe (or Sbraga), known as Nicola da Urbino, archived via Wayback Machine. - [4] J. Paul Getty Museum, 'Plate with the Abduction of Helen,' Museum Collection Online, object 84.DE.118. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Nicola da Urbino.' Tertiary source, consolidating the Pellipario/Negroni correction and the Isabella d'Este service; flagged for replacement with Negroni 1986 and Mallet 2007 directly. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Francesco Xanto Avelli.' Tertiary source, for his arrival in Urbino, his signing practice, and the dating of his earliest unsigned work; flagged for replacement with Mallet 2007. - [7] Musee national de la Renaissance, Chateau d'Ecouen, 'Arts du feu' collection page, entry for the Calini service dish with the Sacrifice of Iphigenia. - [8] Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Plate with Paris Killing Achilles and arms of the Calini family,' object 84.3.2. - [9] Jessie McNab, 'Maiolica in the Renaissance,' Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2002. - [10] British Antique Dealers' Association, dealer profile for Rainer Zietz Ltd. - [11] Wikimedia Commons, file and licence metadata for the lead photograph of the Getty dish (photographer Sailko). - [12] Wikimedia Commons, Category: Maiolica in the Getty Center. - [15] Wikipedia, 'Muzio Calini,' for confirmation of his 1525 birth in Brescia. Tertiary source. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. 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