Two-handled vase decorated with vines, oak branches, birds, and insects

The shape of the vase, ovoid with flared mouth and foot and handles shaped like masks, is attributed to the sculptor Urbano Lucchesi (Lucca, 1844 – Florence, 1906), artistic director of the Manifattura Ginori in the last decades of the 19th century. 

The considerable size for a porcelain artifact, as well as the ambitious decoration, suggest that this piece, like its twin also  at the Museo Ginori, was created as a demonstration of skill to be exhibited in a Ginori shop or at one of the many national and international exhibitions in which the factory participated during the 1880s and 1890s. To date, however, no record of this has emerged in the documents.

The elegant ornamentation eclectically combines Japonism in the decoration of oak branches and flowering vines with pink flowers alongside the arabesques of the horizontal bands on a blue background encircling the vase. Inspiration from Eastern art is evident not only in the designs but also in the refined techniques used to create them: the intertwined patterns on a blue background, outlined by a thin raised gold line delimiting the various color fields, imitate cloisonné enamels, while the oak branches inhabited by small winged creatures in gold and platinum reproduce the slight relief effect of Japanese lacquerwork, meticulously rendering the details of the leaves and the birds’ plumage. The sumptuous decoration is completed by the chiaroscuro achieved through agate-point hatching.

The porcelain imitation of gilded lacquers and oriental-style cloisonné and their eclectic reinterpretation owe chiefly to Minton – a factory at the forefront of the English aesthetic movement at the time – which employed both techniques from the late 1860s onward, gaining widespread acclaim in Europe and the United States. The earliest documented use of raised gold in Anglo-Japanese style at Doccia dates to 1884, when objects with this type of decoration were exhibited in Turin and King Umberto I commissioned Ginori to produce a series of plates with similar reliefs and hand-painted polychrome fruit. 

In the same year, 1884, a “large vase in porcelain, with a band in the middle, with masks painted with leaves and birds in bright colors” (AMD, 19th-century correspondence, folder 8, file 49, 7 August 1884, draft list of items shipped to Paris) of the same dimensions, was sent by Ginori to the Paris Decorative Arts Exhibition and was noted as remarkable in a chronicle by Giuseppe Corona. Although it is not the same vase under discussion since the decoration was executed with a different technique, it serves as a likely chronological reference for the model, which we also find, paired with other decorations, in subsequent exhibitions in London in 1888, Palermo in 1891, and Zurich in 1893.