Footnotes

Provenance
From one of the most important maiolica services of the 16th century, originally consisting of about 120 pieces and probably made for, or acquired by, the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany;
Count Ugolino della Gheradesca Collection, no. 316 (applied collector's label);
D. Serra Collection (by 1964);
Private Collection, Italy

Literature
Le maioliche della collezione D. Serra, Galleria la Porta d'Oro, n.d. [1964], no. 44;
Thornton, Dora and Wilson, Timothy, Italian Renaissance Ceramics A catalogue of the British Museum collection, vol. I, 2009, p. 328, n. 5

The service depicts episodes from the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage (219-217 BC), and surviving pieces from this service fall into two categories: twelve plates at the start of the narrative sequence have rhyming couplets on the reverse and space intended for a coat-of-arms (or with the arms erased) - possibly a princely commission that was abandoned; the second part of the narrative sequence consists of three trilobed basins in the Bargello (numbered 41, 43 and 44), and a series of sequentially numbered plates (numbered between 47 and 114) with rhyming couplets, of which twenty-five are recorded. While the narrative follows Livy, no printed sources have been identified. The service is discussed in detail and surviving pieces listed by Rudolf E.A. Drey, "Istoriato maiolica with scenes from the Second Punic War. Livy's history of Rome as source material," in T. Wilson (ed.), Italian Renaissance pottery: papers written in association with a colloquium at the British Museum in 1987, 1990, pp. 51-61. Thornton and Wilson (see above Literature) note that this dish may have been no. 82 in the sequence, though the number on the back of the present lot above the inscription appears to have been erased.

A large part of the service appears to have been in Locarno in southern Switzerland by 1735, when it is mentioned in a letter written by Ernst Ludwig Burckhardt, the governor of Maggiatal, in which he relates that a part of the service was brought to Locarno from Florence by someone who rescued it from a fire at a Grand Ducal palace. An offer by the father of the then owners to return the service to the Grand Duke was declined as it was no longer complete. See Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, vol. I, 2009, cat. nos. 192 and 193; and Marino Marini, Maiolica and Ceramics in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, 2024, cat. 249a-c, for the three trilobed basins in the Bargello Museum in Florence.