TONDINO, URBINO, CIRCLE OF FRANCESCO XANTO AVELLI?, 1530-1535 CIRCA in polychrome painted majolica; on the reverse side two old collection labels and fragments of an exhibition label; diam. cm 25,8, foot diam. cm 8,5, h. cm 3,3 A PLATE (TONDINO), GUBBIO, CIRCLE OF FRANCESCO XANTO AVELLI?, CIRCA 1530-1530 Comparative bibliography B. Rackham, Victoria and Albert Museum. Catalogue of Italian Maiolica, London 1977, pp. 211-212 n. 632; C. Ravanelli Guidotti, Ceramiche occidentali del Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna. Bologna 1985, pp. 126-128 n. 99; E. Ivanova, Il secolo d'oro della maiolica. Italian ceramics of the 15th-16th centuries from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, exhibition catalogue, Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza 2003, p. 69 n. 38; G. Hendel, Il ritratto, una sequenza di sonnetti di Francesco Xanto Avelli, in J.V.G. Mallet, Xanto pitttore di maioliche, poeta, uomo del Rinascimento, Rovigo 2008, pp. 179, XXVIII The dish has a deep cavetto, a wide oblique brim with a rounded rim edged in yellow, and rests on a low ring foot. On the back the profiles are striped in yellow. On the front a scene covers the entire surface: in the center a sleeping girl and Cupid intent to cut a lock of her hair, while at his sides two other girls, also asleep, leaning on the turf; in the exergue a small pool of water. The scene, which has not been identified, may represent a symbolic interpretation of an ancient myth or refer to one of the deeds of the young Cupid. The painter here exalts the outlines of the elongated faces, whose profiles are highlighted in manganese brown, highlights the physiognomic and physical features of the characters, and gives ample space to the landscape perspectives. The eyes, visible in the figure of Cupid, are small, rendered in black with a small touch of white; the drapery is watercoloured and emphasised with brushstrokes of shading to enhance the folds; the landscape is wide, enclosed between two trees with dark arched trunks and in the background hills with squared profiles on which some villages can be seen; the sky is inhabited by snail-like clouds in shades of orange and brown. The pictorial style shows the influence of Nicola di Gabriele Sbraghe, whose stylistic features, here rigid and almost exaggerated, do not seem to be the same. Some elements in the rendering of Cupid, such as the expression of his face, sullen and serious, the way of rendering the squared mountains in the background and the grassy crags arranged in a disorderly manner, almost as if to accompany the already sketched figures, and the arrangement of the figures themselves on the plate also suggest a clear influence of the work of Francesco Xanto Avelli. The central figure finds its inspiration in a re-elaboration of the engraving of Alessandro and Rossana by Gian Giacomo Carraglio, in which the female figure is combed by Eros, a theme treated by Xanto in the well-known plate in the Victoria and Albert Museum with the Marriage of Nino and Semiramide (inv. ...), even more visible in the small fragment in the Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna, with a decidedly more marked and tenacious pictorial intensity. The head of the female figure seems to be adapted from the three sleeping women, while the putto probably derives from another engraving. In Xanto's work there is a concrete hypothesis that the figures are revisited on the basis of the event to which the painter wanted to symbolically refer (perhaps in our case the sonnet XXVIII, in which he alludes to "ingegni che... sono dati al sonno"?). There is a certain closeness in the pictorial and stylistic methods with the plate depicting the Fates in the St. Petersburg Museum (inv. no. F3042), attributed by some authors to the painter from Rovinj around the 1530s, in which a clear symbolic interpretation leads to inspiration from the sonnets of the painter himself. The work, which undoubtedly deserves further study, is therefore, in our opinion, confined to Xanto Avelli and, more probably, his circle, and was painted between 1530 and 1540.