Patanazzi Workshop (active in the 16th-17th centuries)
Urbino inkwell
faience, h 31.5 cm
Entry by Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti
The work consists of a small, flat, oval base on which a seated female figure rests, playing a mandola. At the bottom right is a small container for ink, and to her left is the standing figure of a child. Painted in full polychrome. It is a joyful subject of escapism, which stands out as a rare example of period costume: the female figure wears a sumptuous dress of exotic taste, composed of a richly embroidered tunic and a cone-shaped headdress of considerable height, with a raised front tip and adorned with bows and ribbons: on the left side is modeled a child wearing a kind of turban. No less interesting is the careful craftsmanship of the chair on which the woman is seated, which is without armrests, but with a high back and pierced lower supports, according to the custom of the time, especially in the furnishings of the privileged classes, where sitting on a chair was considered a privilege. The female musician also holds a mandola, which is very plausible, i.e., recognizable for the pear-shaped soundboard with a convex bottom, staves, and resonance hole presumably hidden by the woman's arm, while the tailpiece-bridge and the folded pegbox are well defined. This work as a whole, in a ceramicological sense, enriches a group of other contemporary Urbino sculptures, present in prestigious private and public collections. They were mostly created with a private character, that is, for the exclusive use of those who had commissioned them or received them as gifts, always for practical purposes, since they were intended either as writing sets or as guttatoi. The theme of the concert was particularly popular, as confirmed by several versions of similar sculptures that reflected the fashion of the late 16th century, with characters in exotic clothing or in clothes of the time, confirmed moreover, not only by faience, but also by prints, paintings, frescoes, etc. In maiolica, just to narrow the field, we point out those with a musical theme depicting -Orpheus playing the cithara enchanting the animals" and Concert of wind and plectrum instruments", from the collections of the Faenza Museum. But among all these creations, mostly without date, for reasons of attribution and chronology it is worth remembering both that of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, dated "1584" and with the signature "Vrbini Patanazzi fecit", and that destined for Cesare Baronio, of the Faenza Museum, depicting the "Lamentation", whose dating is to be related to the cardinalatial election of the important Roman prelate which took place on June 5, 15963.
