Book Launch Italian Maiolica and Other Early Modern Ceramics in The Courtauld Gallery

Please join us in celebrating the publication of the first catalogue devoted to The Courtauld’s distinguished collection of Italian Maiolica and Early Modern ceramics. Maiolica is one of the most revealing expressions of Renaissance art and the extraordinary pieces in The Courtauld’s collection showcase brilliantly the skill of potters and pottery painters working at the time of Raphael and Titian. The collection includes a magnificent group of vessels made during the high Renaissance, the golden age of Italian maiolica, and includes precious and delicate Deruta lustreware with imagery deriving from Perugino and Raphael, as well as vessels painted in a narrative style of pottery painting known as istoriato.
All major Renaissance pottery centres are represented, including Siena, Faenza and Venice, as well as splendid examples of the mysterious pharmacy jars made at the foot of the mountain of Gran Sasso in the town of Castelli d’Abruzzo. There are also handsome examples of Spanish lustreware, lead-glaze from France and Ottoman pottery.
The volume includes an introductory essay on Italian Renaissance maiolica by the leading scholar on the subject, John Mallet, as well as an essay by Elisa Paola Sani and Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Courtauld Gallery, on the Victorian collector Thomas Gambier Parry, which sheds new light on the development of this fascinating collection, connecting Gambier Parry’s artistic practice to his collecting and revealing new insights into his taste as a connoisseur.
The detailed catalogue entries by Elisa Paola Sani also reveal affinities and influences between different pottery traditions and uncover a wealth of new information on the provenance of the pieces.
Dr Elisa Paola Sani is an art historian and curator specialising in the arts of the Renaissance. She studied art history at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Perugia and Siena Universities. She has held curatorial positions at the Wallace Collection and at the V&A and until recently was a research fellow at the Courtauld. She is author and contributor of books and exhibition catalogues including: Xanto Pottery-painter, Poet and Man of the Italian Renaissance by J.V.G. Mallet (Wallace Collection 2007); Italian Renaissance Maiolica (V&A Publishing, 2012); Sacred and Profane Beauty, Deruta Renaissance Maiolica (Leprince and Raccanello, 2017); Maiolica Before Raphael (Sam Fogg Gallery, 2017); with J.V.G. Mallet: Italian Maiolica and Beyond: Papers in Honour of Timothy Wilson (Ashmolean Publications, 2021). She is currently working on two scholarly catalogues: of an important private collection of italian Renaissance maiolica and - with J.V.G Mallet- of the Rothschild collection of Italian maiolica at Waddesdon Manor
Professor Timothy Wilson is an Honorary Curator in the Department of Western Art of the Ashmolean Museum, of which he was formerly Keeper until his retirement in 2017. He is a specialist in the decorative arts of the European Renaissance, and a leading scholar of Italian maiolica, publishing in this area regularly since 1984. Professor Wilson has published collections of Renaissance ceramics for the British Museum, the National Gallery of Art (Washington), the Musei del Castello Sforzesco (Milan), the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Vienna) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), as well as three important private collections. His book Italian Maiolica and Europe, incorporating a catalogue of the post-Classical Italian pottery in the Ashmolean Museum, was published in the summer of 2017 and The Golden Age of Italian Maiolica-Painting, in 2018. between 2019 and 2022 he completed the organization of and co-authored the catalogues of maiolica exhibitions at Palazzo Madama in Turin, the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.
Dr Alexandra Gerstein is the curator of sculpture and decorative arts at The Courtauld Gallery.
Professor Guido Rebecchini is professor of Sixteenth Century Southern European Art at The Courtauld.