TO FRANCESCO XANTO AVELLI DISH, URBINO, CIRCA 1530 DISH, URBINO, FRANCESCO XANTO AVELLI, CIRCA 1530 in faience painted in polychrome with cobalt blue, copper green in two tones, manganese brown, antimony yellow in shades of yellow and orange. Under foot in manganese brown: De inoet Athama(n)te i(n)fu/riati. /FabulaY and label of provenance FLORENCE TACCANI ANTICHITÀ - MILANO ; diam. cm 26.5, foot diam. cm 9, h. cm 2.7 Provenance Matthew Uzielli, London (Christie's, London, 12-19 April 1861, no. 364); Alexandre de Talleyrand-Perigord, duc de Dino (Paris, 8 May 1894, no. 34); Henri Leroux (Paris, 26 February 1968, no. 136); Florence Taccani, Milan; Private Collection Literature J.C. Triolo, The armorial maiolica of Francesco Xanto Avelli , The Pennsylvania State University 1996, p. 265 no. 3A.6, fig. 13; E.P. Sani, List of works by or attributable to Francesco Xanto Avelli, in J.V.G. Mallet, XAntp. Pottery-painter, poet, man of the Italian renaissance, London 2007, p. 81 n. 103; C. Ravanelli Guidotti, Xanto: unpublished or little-known works, in "Faenza" XCIII, 2007, p. 84 fig. 7c; G. Kaucher, Le Peintre du Marsyas de Milan. La majolique historiée à Urbino en 1530, Paris 2024, p. 319 n. VIII Comparative literature J. Rasmussen, The Robert Lehman Collection. 10. Italian Majolica , New York 1989 pp. 126-1331, nos. 75-76; T Wilson in L Hollein, R Franz, T Wilson (eds.), Tin-glaze and image culture. The MAK Majolica Collection in Its Wider Context , Vienna 2022, pp 78-79 n. 39 The dish has a low cavetto, a wide, slightly sloping brim and rests on a low, ringless foot; the rim on the back shows three concentric relief fillets. The front depicts a mythological scene narrating the events of Ino and Atamante taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Atamanthus, son of Aeolus, married Ino in a second marriage and from their union Learco and Melicerte were born. The man agreed to raise the baby Dionysus, born of the union between Jupiter and Semele, entrusted by Jupiter himself to Ino as the child's aunt. But Juno, enraged, drove Atamanthus mad through the fury of Tisiphon, who urged him to kill his son Learcus. Ino out of grief threw himself into the sea with his other son Melicerte and together they turned into the two sea gods Leucothea and Palemon. A depiction of the myth comes to us from an engraving in the vernacular version by Giovanni dei Bonsignori ( Ovidio Methamorphoseos vulgare, Venice 1497, fig. 32v), which maintains the chronological scansion of events, and which is flanked by variations in later editions, such as that of Jean de Tournes ( La Métamorphose d'Ovide figurèe , Lyon 1557) with woodcuts by Bernard Salomon, which were often used in majolica. The narrative setting is that of tradition, but we are accustomed to Xanto Avelli's habit of using different engraving sources for his work, and in this case too, the painter from Rovigo has skilfully exercised his art through the use of characters taken individually from different engravings. Xanto interprets the scene in his own way: On the right, Atamanthus kills his son by knocking him over a cliff surmounted by a grass sod, on top of which stands an emblem, not yet unanimously identified, of three silver half-moons on a blue field, while on the left Ino throws his son into the pool of water painted in the exergue of the plate; in the background, which appears beyond a horizon bordered by a fence, is a wide landscape made opaque and bluish by the shadow cast by the setting sun. As far as engraving sources are concerned, the figure of Atamanthus is taken from the engraving The Massacre of the Innocents by Nicolas Beatrizet (Bartsch XV, no. 14), Ino is instead taken from one of the figures on the right of Gian Giacomo Caraglio's engraving by Rosso Fiorentino depicting The Struggle between the Muses and the Pierides (Bartsch XIV, no. 53), while the small Melicerte is a variation of one of Marcantonio Raimondi's Dancing Cupids by Raphael (Bartsch XV, no. 217). All the figures were used several times in Xanto's works and so were the stylistic and narrative structure, which we find in related works such as the plate in the Glasgow City Council Museum (inv. no. 1893.93). The figure of Adamantes appears in the cup with the depiction of the same myth in the Vienna MAK, and this is the most pregnant comparison: the cup with lustre, recently published, bears the full signature of master Giorgio from Gubbio and under the lustre an inscription related to the depicted myth in the hand of Xanthus and associated with the date 1528 and the letter φ. In the depiction of Adamante, the work of comparison mirrors the setting and use of engraving as in the plate under examination, but proposes a different arrangement of the scene and a greater richness in the realisation of the background landscape and the elements that act as a backdrop to the scene. Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti recalled the plate under examination in the proceedings of the conference on Francesco Xanto Avelli, proposing a dating to the years 1528-1529 also due to the presence of the letter Y/φ or feliciana letter, to the use of which the painter remained faithful until around 1530, when he began to sign in full. Concerning the Y/φ r sign, we refer to the card for the second Xanto plate in this catalogue (lot 11). On the other hand, we refer to Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti's essay on the use of the coat-of-arms with crescent moons in works painted by different painters in 2007. However, we emphasise here in particular the interpretation and attribution to the French Bannes family, marquises of Puygiron, put forward by Charles Mannheim when presenting the dish under consideration here for the 1894 sale, and accepted by Alice Wolf's in a note to a MET dish. This hypothesis was later rejected by Rasmussen, and there are now various attributive interpretations linked to Italian families, with more than one painter being acknowledged in the drafting of the service. The dish, which is of great quality, is thus being re-proposed to scholars after a long period of oblivion, offering itself to new and interesting study proposals.