of shallow rounded form with broad sloping rim, supported on a short narrow foot, painted in underglaze cobalt blue, green, yellow and brown, the well with a figure in Turkish dress on a rearing horse, the rim decorated with alternating scale patterning and vegetal scrolls, the reverse glazed in greyish-green with two rough spirals, old collection labels
41 cm. diam.

Footnotes

Provenance: acquired from the Bohler Collection, Munich
Formerly in the Veermeister Collection, Netherlands.

A similar plate with the central figure on horseback depicted wearing Turkish costume is in the British Museum (1855,3-13,3), illustrated and discussed in D. Thorton and T. Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics II, The British Museum Press, 2009, no. 259. Thorton and Wilson comment that among the commonest designs on large Deruta dishes are single figures of horsemen, more often than not with turbans of a broadly Ottoman or Mamluk type, dating these Turkish horsemen dishes from the 1520s to the 1550s (see the catalogue entry cited for a full list of Turkish horsemen dishes).

Poole suggests they may have been introduced at Deruta around the time of the repulse of the Turkish armies from Vienna in 1529, making our dish an early example of the Turkish horsemen type (J. Poole, Italian Maiolica and Incised Slipware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge., 1995, p. 200).

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- Islamic and Indian Art
- Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art

A large Maiolica dish with portrait of Suleyman the Magnificent Deruta, Italy, Circa 1535

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Oliver White