most elegantly wrought earthen vases which for the donor’s sake are prized as much as gold or silver instead of earthenware. Another letter from Lorenzo the magnificent to Roberto Malatesta of Pesaro, thanking him for a similar present, says, “they please me entirely by their perfection and rarity, being quite novelties in these parts, and are valued more than if of silver, the donor’s arms serving daily to recall their origin.” There is every reason for assuming that both these presents consisted of wares produced at the Pesaro furnaces.
These wares must have been looked upon as “novelties” at Florence, not simply because they were painted on flat surfaces covered with stanniferous glaze (for Luca della Robbia had done this many years before) but because, being decorated with rich metallic glaze and madreperla lustre, they probably were novelties to the Florentines as productions of an Italian pottery. If this inference be correct, may not another be drawn from it? That these presents being the produce of Pesaro, and enriched with the metallic lustre, we may derive from the whole matter an additional proof that the early lustred pieces, whose origin has been disputed, were really made at that city; and that we may agree with Passeri in ascribing the well-known “bacili” to that place. Engraved p. [107] is a fine lustred bacile at South Kensington, probably of Pesaro ware, and about the year 1510.
The earliest dated Pesaro piece is in the possession of the writer. It is a “fruttiera” which is painted the creation of animals by the Almighty, Who, moving in the midst, is surrounded by animals rising out of the ground; a distant landscape, with a town (!) on the side of a steep mountain, forms the background.
On the reverse is inscribed as in the woodcut on the next page,
1540.
Chrianite anim
allis Christtus
fatto in Pesaro.
We have seen some large dishes decorated with raised masks, strapwork, &c. and painted with grotesques on a white ground, and subject panels, and other grandiose pieces which are ascribed to the Urbino artists, but which may in equal likelihood be attributed to the Lanfranchi of Pesaro. A triangular plateau in the possession of Mrs. Hope has the character of their finest productions.
The art at Pesaro rapidly declined after 1560, wanting the encouragement of a reigning ducal court; and Passeri ascribes much evil influence to what he considers the bad taste of preferring the unmeaning designs of the oriental porcelain, which was greatly prized by the wealthy, and the painting after the prints of the later German school of Sadeler, &c. to the grander works of the old masters; the landscapes were, however, well executed. He gives us also a history of the revival of the manufacture in his own time, under the influence and encouragement of the cardinal prelate Ludovico Merlini. In 1718 there was only one potter at Pesaro, Alfonzo Marzi, who produced the most ordinary wares. In 1757 signor Giuseppe Bertolucci, an accomplished ceramist of Urbania, in conjunction with signor Francesco di Fattori, engaged workmen and artists and commenced a fabrique, but it was soon abandoned. Again in 1763 signors Antonio Casali and Filippo Antonio Caligari, both of Lodi, came to Pesaro and were joined by Pietro Lei da Sassuolo of Modena, an able painter on Maiolica; they established a fabrique producing wares of great excellence hardly to be distinguished from the Chinese. In the Debruge-Labarte collection was a one-handled jug or pot, painted with flowers in white medallions on a blue ground, and on the foot engraven in the paste—
“Pesaro 1771.”
A manufacture at present exists of painted tiles for pavement, removed to Pesaro from Urbania, and which at one time produced vases and plates in the manner of the Urbino istoriati pieces as also lustred wares after the style of M. Giorgio. It has, we are informed, ceased making these imitations and now confines itself to the first-named class of goods.