Italian Renaissance Ceramics from the Howard I. and Janet H. Stein Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Softcover
224 pages, 8 ¾ x 10 ¾ in.
122 color + 55 b/w illus.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001
ISBN 9780876331552

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the fortunate beneficiary of Howard I. and Janet H. Stein’s important collection of Italian Renaissance ceramics. This handsome book features the Stein Collection and also brings it together, for the first time, with related pieces belonging to the museum. More than ninety objects, painted in vibrant colors that have survived half a millennium with undiminished brilliance, are reproduced in color and black-and-white. Together they represent the various shapes, ornamentation, ambitious compositions, and complex narratives characteristic of a distinguished selection of ceramics from Renaissance Italy. The fascinating history of these objects unfolds in the text by specialist Wendy M. Watson. Included is an original essay by Dean Walker on collecting maiolica in the United States, and a detailed scholarly checklist.

Wendy M. Watson is a curator at Mount Holyoke Art Museum and the Skinner Museum. Dean Walker is the Henry P. McIlhenny Senior Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.