Dish, painted tin-glazed earthenware with lustre decoration. Depicting a shepherd and a wolf with an inscription: Mala Nuvella Pro li pecore poie che elupo e dacordo el pa...'. Italy (Gubbio), about 1510.

In the middle, within a wreath of formal buds, Aesop's Fable of the Shepherd and the Wolf, adapted from a woodcut illustrating Fable 63, De Pastore et Lupo, in Tuppo's edition published at Naples in 1485. The shepherd, in ragged tunic, leans asleep on his staff with his dog at his feet; to the left, a wolf howling and three sheep on a crag, trees to the right. Below, a table with an inscription. The rim is divided by radiating palmettes into four panels filled with scale-pattern.

Bequeathed by George Salting, Esq.

Passeri, Fau and Gavet Collections. Red laquer (sealing wax) Seal mark (F) on the back.
J Mallet
See volume.
A dish in the Fortnum Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford is painted with the fable of the Capon and the Hawk after a woodcut in the same edition, and perhaps forms part of a set with the present dish. Illustrated by Mallet a V&A crisis in Ceramics Review. See in Volume of Ceramiche Umbre. Cf piece in Faenza Museum with Ubaldo, same colours. Green, blue and red yellow lustre. Note provenance from Passeri collection.

(from Sani, pp.78-9) Early narrative scenes on maiolica often follow their woodcut sources very closely. Aesop's Fables was a popular choice for moral education. A woodcut illustration in one of the first complete Italian translations of the fables, published in Naples in 1485, made an exemplar for the decoration of a lustred maiolica dish from around 1510, probably one of the earliest attempts at narrative painting made in Gubbio.

C.2171-1910