'THE founder of the FONTANA Workshop at Urbino, Guido Durantino, is as an artist a somewhat elusive personality'. So wrote Bernard Rackham in 1933, but by 1940 when his Catalogue of Italian Maiolica was published, he attributed to this Scarlet Pimpernel of a painter as many as twelve items in the Victoria and Albert's collections. Also in 1940, Rackham published in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE what is still the most recent extended account of Guido. In this, while admitting 'that we have no clear evidence that Guido was not only a master potter but also a maiolica-painter', Rackham none the less made assumptions leading him to conclude that many pieces of istoriato maiolica till then assigned to Nicola da Urbino were really the work of Guido Durantino. It is my belief that Rackham was right to thin out the ranks of work then too freely attributed to Nicola, but wrong to assign the doubtful pieces to Guido Durantino.

IN 1845 the medieval church and priory buildings at Davington in Kent were purchased by Thomas Willement (1786-1871). At the time they were in a near ruinous condition and Willement, who was something of an antiquarian and a noted designer and stained glass artist, set about restoring them. Besides extensive rebuilding, he also made some skilful additions and installed an interesting collection of stained glass. Much of this was set in special leaded pat-terns with inscriptions as well as heraldic and decorative panels which he designed himself. However, one panel (Fig. 12) was unceremoniously attached to a clear glass window in an upstairs room looking straight onto a steep tiled roof where, as a later owner, Christopher Gibbs, put it, 'only when it snowed was it seen in all its glory, and that is not very often'.

THE debt which the Islamic world owes to China for inspiration in ceramic manufacture is well known. Indeed, without too much distortion, one can divide Islamic ceramic history into three parts, each beginning with a new impetus from the latest kind of Chinese imports.

SPANISH pottery of the fifteenth century is as remarkable for its variety as for its quality. If the well-known lustreware of Valencia, which was exported to many European countries, represents the art of the Morisco potters at its most spectacular, it should not be forgotten that in Teruel, using the traditional tin-glaze colours purple and green, they produced basins, baptismal fonts, storage jars and other large vessels which are among the masterpieces of early tin-glazed earthenware. Less well known, but evidently of considerable importance in spite of the scarcity of examples, is a type of pottery painted in blue and manganese. Of this small group, numbering fifteen published pieces in all, perhaps the most handsome are two dishes in the Victoria and Albert Museum, hitherto unrecorded (Figs.23 and 24).

IN 1715 Frederick, the hereditary prince of Hesse and son of the Landgrave Carl of Hesse-Kassel, married Princess Ulrika Eleonora of Sweden, sister of King Charles XII, his first wife, Louise Dorothea Sophie of Brandenburg, having died at an early age in 1705. As a result of that connection some examples of the highly developed Hessian glasscutting and engraving industry found their way to Stockholm. This period of Swedish-Hessian relations is represented by two well known goblets in the National Museum in Stockholm with stems in the form of mould blown male figures and wheel engraved allegories of the coronation of the Swedish princess, which took place at Uppsala on 8th March 1719 (Fig.30). On the underside of the foot of each is the pontil mark carved as an eight-rayed star, a feature characteristic of Franz Gondelach, the most gifted glass-engraver of the period. The star is missing in two goblets now in America, which bear the Swedish-Hessian royal arms and are in a style similar to Gondelach's. They probably date from a year later, after Ulrika Eleonora had abdicated and thus enabled her husband to become king. The goblets have not hitherto been noticed, and seem to me worth discussing in some detail.

THE drinking glasses decorated at the Dresden court by Johann Friedrich (or Johann Martin) Meyer are unique in the annals of enamelled glass. Relief enamelling had been used on Bottger red stoneware vessels about 1710, and by the 1720s relief-enamelled decoration, sometimes augmented with faceted garnets, was also applied to drinking glasses. Two distinct types of drinking glasses by Meyer have survived. One type features plaques which are decorated with portraits of the Elector Augustus the Strong, the crowned conjoined coats of arms of Saxony and Poland, and the Elector's crowned monogram FAR or AR. The second type has elaborate scenes which feature raised human and animal figures. Recent technical examination has provided interesting information on how Meyer resolved the technical problems of mounting enamel on glass.

THE printed designs that are confined within an area of five inches square on the flat surface of Liverpool eighteenth-century tiles offer a wide variety of subject-matter with an equally wide diversity of origin. This applies even for the early woodcuts of about 1756, probably dating from before Sadler and Green started mass production by printing one thousand two hundred tiles in a six-hour shift that year, presumably using copper plates. Since their production was aimed directly at underselling the Dutch imported tiles, it is natural to find a fair measure of mimicry, especially at the outset. This is seen in the elaborate and heavy borders and the Dutch canal and other genre scenes. The origin of one such scene on an early tile (Fig.47) is an engraving Le soir, by J.P. Le Bas after the Dutchman Nicolaes Berchem or Berghem, 1740 (Fig.48).

FROM their first publication in 17931 Flaxman's illustrations to the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer proved a valuable source of inspiration for designers of the decorative arts as well as being universally praised by writers and artists as embodying the cultural ideals of classical art.