A MUSEUM and its collections have their own history, but much of the most interesting information that would bring to life the work of the Museum in the past exists only as folk memory - all too fragile and unreliable a recording medium. The Museum files, where the papers recording the processes of acquisition are kept, have been subject in the past to severe civil-service 'weed- ing', aimed at removing all but the essential administrative information. This has often left only fragments of the arguments proffered, as acquisitions were considered, negotiated and de- cided, together with tantalising hints of the temperaments of the people involved. Where clues do remain to the 'atmosphere' of the times, they usually offer an illuminating and often unexpected view of the objects to which they refer. A recent project to catalogue the collection of studio pottery in the Victoria and Albert Museum gave an opportunity to comb through the old administrative papers.' The formal proposals and justifications for acquisition made by the relevant curator to the Director of the Museum provide some flavour of the past.

IN 1988 the Victoria & Albert Museum purchased a dish by the Danish architect and designer, Thorvald Bindesbell (Fig.86). An example of the ceramic work of this most important figure had been sought for some time. As a leading personality in Danish artistic circles throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Bindesbell's significance cannot be over-stressed, and any Museum collection planned to illustrate the course of Danish ceramic production has to include at least one good piece.

IT Is nearly 30 years1 since a group of delftwares with cobalt-blue bird-on-rock decoration, imitating Wan-li period Chinese export porcelain, was attributed to the 'galley pot maker',2 Christian Wilhelm, who had established a pottery at Pickleherring Quay, Southwark, at least as early as 1618. Despite the fact that many of the jugs of Continental type in the group are now considered to be Dutch, and that it now seems highly unlikely that Wilhelm, a wealthy businessman, would have decorated pottery himself,3 the attribution of the main core of dated pieces to the Pickleherring factory still stands, undisturbed by subsequent excavations on the Pickleherring and Montague Close sites. By the time Wilhelm obtained his patent in 1628, he had been joined by eight further potters,4 among whom it may be supposed that there was at least one talented painter, for it is in that year that the dated series begins (see Appendix).

FURNITURE is not always wooden; indeed it is sometimes at its most interesting when at its least wooden.* It may incorporate elements which would, isolated, properly have belonged to the Victoria & Albert Museum's Departments of Metalwork, Sculpture, Textiles or Ceramics. French eighteenth-century furniture mounted with Sevres porcelain is the most obvious of many cer- amic examples. Pieces of furniture which, like the Department of Ceramics itself, incorporate glass are less common - with the obvious exception of mirrors. They range from sixteenth-century German caskets, seventeenth-century Neapolitan cabinets and late eighteenth-century Russian desks decorated with panels of verre eglomisi, to Brunswick cabinets of the late seventeenth cen- tury and English clocks of the early eighteenth century covered in mirror glass.1 In Brunswick, again, glass beads were used to decorate furniture in the early eighteenth century. Glass can also be used in a more structural r6le, from table tops of 1744 to 1745 in the dazzling Spiegelkabinett of the Wiurzburg Residenz, to table-tops and bases produced in St Petersburg and probably designed by Voronikhin in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to a cut-glass iagtre made for the Indian market by F. & C. Osler of Birmingham in 1882. Otto Wagner's 1898 bath for his Kostlergasse apartment, Pierre Legrain's glass piano and Denham Maclaren's glass tables reflect the rapid naturalisation of glass as a modern material.4 It may also crop up unexpectedly in furniture contexts, as in the goldfish bowl incorporated in a table at Capodimonte, derived from Percier and Fontaine, in which goldfish lived and perished during the 1972 Age of Neo- Classicism exhibition.

FRANCESCO XANTO AVELLI da Rovigo is among the most inter- esting as well as the most prolific maiolica painters who worked in Urbino during the burgeoning decades of istoriato maiolica production in Italy. He was active from the 1520s (in Urbino at least as early as 1530) and the fact that he signed and dated his work - mostly between 1530 and 1542 - means that his wuvre is better known than that of any of his contemporaries.' Xanto's intellectual abilities also distinguish him from his potter and painter colleagues: the inscriptions in which he mentions the sub- jects of his paintings and their literary sources reveal him to have been a man of wide culture, familiar with Italian poetry and classical literature.2 He was also a poet himself, writing encomia on the Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria della Rovere, who, as is well known, was one of the great patrons of renaissance art.3 Xanto therefore provides us with the rare example of a craftsman - for such was the status of maiolica painters - whose intellectual qualifications it has been possible to assess.

WHEN Francisco Niculoso came to Seville from Italy at the very end of the fifteenth century,' he changed the course of Spanish pottery, inventing a new form of architectural ceramic, the tile-picture. There is evidence that he made figures as well as tiles, but he apparently produced no useful wares. Niculoso brought with him the palette of the Italian maiolica painters, which was far more varied than the somewhat restricted palette commonly found on Spanish medieval wares. On his flat, rather than moulded tiles, he painted renaissance designs including the grotesques that were at that time the very latest fashion. Although his surviving commissions show that he was much sought after, there seems to have been a reversion in taste soon after his death in 1529,2 and it was not until the 1550s that Spanish pottery was once again influenced by renaissance designs and techniques, this time with lasting effect.

THIS ARTICLE examines a series of groups of glass, enamels and porcelain made from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, which are decorated with gold applied in the form of foil, and discusses the problems of their dating and attribution. G.E. Pazaurek was the first, and only, scholar to comment on and illustrate examples of this technique. In 1902, in a report on an exhibition held in Reichenberg (then in Germany, now the Severobesk6 Museum, Liberec, Czechoslovakia),' he drew attention to a porcelain bowl bearing the signature 'Hunger F.' together with a scroll, which was then in the Sammlung Karl Mayer, Vienna, and is now in the Museum fuir Angewandte Kunst, Vienna.2 Although it is not clear whether Pazaurek had examined the piece, he classified it as Meissen porcelain. The decoration on the bowl, which is in relief gold with the addition of red and green enamels, consists of six reliefs in the Chinese style. Pazaurek used this piece, which remains the only one of its kind with a signature, as the key to the origin and date of a whole group of similarly decorated Meissen porcelain. Although the authenticity of the signature has never been challenged, subsequent authorities including R. Ruickert,3 have com- mented on the similarity of its decoration to a teabowl and saucer in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, which is evidently of Chinese porcelain. Clare Le Corbeiller has discovered by careful observation under ultra-violet light that several comparable items in the Metropolitan Museum collections are also of Chinese porcelain,4 and further Chinese examples have been noted in a private collection in England.

IT IS a pleasure to be able to dedicate to John Mallet an article based on work done for the most part when we served together in the old Ceramics Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, for without his irreplaceable help in other spheres of the Department's activities, I should not have been able to devote as much time to glass studies as was in fact vouchsafed to me. Within that nar- rower sphere, a phenomenon of glass-making which has the closest possible connexion with the ceramic arts should have a claim on the interest of the recipient of this tribute. Opaque-white glass mimics porcelain and derives the inspir- ation for its decoration mainly from the same source. The writer hopes that this 'interdisciplinary' theme will appeal to a known devotee of porcelain.

FRANCESCO XANTO AVELLI was not the most talented pottery-painter of the Renaissance, but he is the most interesting and eccentric personality in the history of maiolica. At times his work seems a delightful microcosm of renaissance culture, at times he can only be judged a preposterous parody of the artistic and cultural aspirations of 'Renaissance man'. His style, his iconographical sources, and his literary interests have been the subject of a good deal of scholarly work in recent years, and a central interest of the great maiolica scholar to whom this issue of this Magazine is dedicated. This article aims to add one minor aspect to the picture, by discussing a group of Xanto's works with scenes from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.

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THE INVENTORY and account-book sources for the decorative art objects that once formed part of the Medici art collections are well-nigh inexhaustible, especially for the grand-ducal period when Medici rule in Tuscany had become established. Indeed this very abundance of docu- ments makes it almost impossible to produce any definitive piece of research, since new unpublished material will always come to light. In the present study, however, the span of time under consideration is at least relatively nar- row, limited to the first decades of the eighteenth century (the last grand-duke, Gian Gastone de'Medici, died in 1737). Less advantageous to the student is the fact that the holdings of Medici porcelain were never united in a single place, but were scattered among the various grand- ducal residences, in addition to being found in what came to be called the Guardaroba generale.' Despite the richness of the archival documentation, inventories drawn up for all the Medicean residences at a single time do not survive, and the possibility can thus never be excluded that objects displaced from one place to another have escaped the net altogether, or, alternatively, have been recorded more than once.

THE REFORMATION and the iconoclasm that followed affected stained-glass rather differently from other less structurally necessary works of ecclesiastical art.* Although the initial destruction of windows deemed 'superstitious' was appalling, it soon became apparent that churches were unusable if not weathertight, and this led to the Royal Injunctions of 1559, which decreed 'preserving nevertheless or otherwise repairing the walls and glass'. As a result stained glass windows, albeit mutilated, have survived in much larger numbers than, for example, wooden images. But the position of glass-painters, as opposed to glaziers, was extremely precarious. Where a sculptor still had commissions for funerary monuments as a source of livelihood, a glass-painter was left with little apart from heraldry. Fortunately attitudes to suspect iconography varied considerably, though they sometimes changed with bewildering rapidity. In 1560, for example, Dame Elizabeth Parlett put a window in the choir of Broadwell church, Oxfordshire, which showed an image of the Holy Trinity with kneeling figures of herself and Sir Thomas Pope in heraldic surcoats of arms. Only a year later she felt obliged to remove it, as it had fallen under suspicion of being 'superstitious'.' Although this kind of uncertainty diminished after the Restoration, it was to linger on to some extent well into the eighteenth century.