Francesco Xanto Avelli da Rovigo was one of the most prolific painters of Italian earthenware (maiolica) in the sixteenth century. He spent most of his career in Urbino, a leading center of ceramic production in Italy, where the technique seen here of painting figural scenes in colorful enamels was perfected in the 1520s. Thanks to inscriptions that Xanto often added to the undersides of many works, in addition to a sonnet he composed and a handful of other surviving documents, we know more about his life and work than that other Renaissance ceramic artists. The underside of this plate is signed and dated 1531, together with an inscription identifying its subject from Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso and a tribute to Xanto’s patrons, the Este family of Urbino.
Xanto was the master of creating complex figural compositions with elements copied from contemporary engravings by other artists. On this plate, for example, art historian Timothy Wilson has identified no fewer than eight different engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi and Marco da Ravenna that Xanto drew upon to create his own design. The result departs in many respects from Ariosto’s narrative but retains the dramatic effect of the scene where hostages liberated from an enchanted castle watch as the knight Ruggiero is carried off by a hippogriff.
ADD TO PROVENANCE: Until 1949, Sir Bernard Eckstein (b. 1894–d. 1948); Eckstein sale, Sotheby’s London (May 3031, 1949), lot 10; William Randolph Hearst; 1949, gift of the Hearst Foundation.