II.—On a Missing Alhambra Vase, and the Ornament of the Vase Series

Abstract

Present knowledge of the so-called Alhambra Vase series suggests that a known total of a dozen or so examples falls short of the vases that exist. A fine though, as usual, imperfect addition to the group attributed to Malaga, excavated at the Carthusian monastery at Jerez de la Frontera in 1930, is now in the Archaeological Museum at Madrid. The Burgio Vase was almost unknown at the moment of its acquisition for the Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, Madrid, in 1924, although recorded by Michele Amari in 1872, together with its fellow at Mazzara that entered the Palermo Museum in the eighties of the nineteenth century. The ‘Giarra di S. Ugo’ with an immemorial location at the Cistercian church at Novara, near Messina, but a precise état civil going back less than half a century, has more recently asserted itself. If the ‘Giarra’ is ill preserved, the details of its decoration that are available indicate with some likelihood that this is a Hispano-Moresque vase of Alhambra type; though, to judge from its reported dimension as to height, of the second, rather than the first rank. It may have been one of the plusieurs vases découvertes en Sidle in which Girault de Prangey discerned, perhaps not too correctly, the closest analogy of shape, execution, and material to the surviving specimen at Granada.