Dish with a Landscape

Jacopo da Pesaro

ca. 1545–50 · Tin-glazed earthenware painted with dark blue and white highlights on light blue berettino ground · European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

This is one of the grandest examples known today of a dish with a landscape scene rendered in blue-tinted glaze (berettino) and monochrome blue decoration. Painters and printmakers in sixteenth-century Venice established the landscape as an independent genre, and the subject was soon adopted in potteries. At the same time a taste developed for berettino wares, which were produced in several centers across Italy. The monochrome palette focuses attention on the painter’s ability to represent space, light and shadow. These effects are masterfully on display here, as the entire surface of the large dish supports the painted scene. The painter allowed himself particularly expressive flourishes of brushwork to render the plants in the foreground on the rim.

Artist

Jacopo da Pesaro

Date

ca. 1545–50

Medium

Tin-glazed earthenware painted with dark blue and white highlights on light blue berettino ground

Culture

Italian, Venice

Department

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Credit line

Johnston Fund, 2017