Frick Collection, New York will run an exhibition named 'Exuberant Grotesques: Renaissance Maiolica from the Fontana Workshop' from September 15, 2009 through January 17, 2010.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Adolphe de Rothschild (1823–1900) assembled a vast collection of medieval and Renaissance sculpture, furniture, and decorative art, including an important collection of Italian maiolica.
At his death, the maiolica passed to his grand-nephew; many pieces were later sold to the celebrated art dealer Joseph Duveen and stayed in Duveen's stock until Norton Simon in 1964 purchased the remaining holdings of the Duveen Brothers.
One striking example from this group — a large charger made in Urbino around 1565 in the Fontana workshop — was given recently to The Frick Collection by Dianne Dwyer Modestini in memory of her husband, Mario Modestini. The first piece of maiolica to enter the museum's holdings, it has inspired a focus exhibition that will address the collecting taste for maiolica in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This project will reunite several maiolica pieces from Baron Adolphe's collection, bringing them together for the first time with examples from other celebrated nineteenth-century European and American collections that have rarely or never been seen in New York. On view in the fall of 2009, the presentation is organized by Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow Charlotte Vignon.
The picture shows Maiolica dish with The Judgment of Paris after Raphael, Fontana workshop, c. 1565, tin-glazed earthenware, The Frick Collection, gift of Dianne Dwyer Modestini in memory of Mario Modestini. -- www.frick.org
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