Maiolica Dish

This dish is the largest maiolica dish that is known to exist. It depicts three separate hunting scenes in an Italian landscape, with figures pursuing a wild boar, stag and hare. In the foreground stands a man with a falcon on his wrist and above another one aims a musket at birds in the sky. The scene is very large and colourful. The dish bears the dated signatures of both the painter - Alessandro di Giorgio pf Faenza, 1593 - and the potter - Federigo of Modena, 1594. Neither of these individuals is otherwise recorded. The gap between the painting and the firing process has plausibly been explained by the need of the potter to find a solution to performing his task on so large an object. Though its origin is uncertain, the dish is now thought to have been made in Montelupo, west of Florence.