Left: Dish with grotesque decoration based on Italian example, Haarlem, approx. 1650, Willem Jansz. Verstraeten, earthenware, Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics (on loan from Fries Museum).
Right: Dish with grotesque decoration, Italy, Urbino, 1600 – 1650, earthenware, Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics (on loan from Ottema-Kingma Stichting).
This Haarlem dish is inspired by a dish from Urbino, Italy. Both dishes are decorated with grotesques: imaginative motifs of floral scrolls and refined human and animal figures. Such decorations became popular after 1488, when the grotesque-decorated Domus Aurea of Nero was discovered in Rome.