Pharmacy Jar (Albarello) (c. 1510): Art, History and Details

Pharmacy Jar (Albarello) (c. 1510) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Storage jars that lined the shelves of Renaissance pharmacies often held medicinal herbs, spices, and ointments. Their shape made them easy to grasp while the flared lip allowed apothecaries to seal off the contents with parchment or cloth secured by a string. This particular storage jar depicts a child riding a wild boar.

Object facts

• Title: Pharmacy Jar (Albarello)
• Date: c. 1510
• Culture: Italy, Siena
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica)
• Dimensions: Overall: 22.6 cm (8 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1965.553

A detail from the museum

The scroll along the bottom reads DIA IRIS, indicating that it may have once held a medicinal iris compound.

Collection credit

Gift of the Twentieth Century Club

Further reading listed by the museum

• Damiron, Charles. Majoliques italiennes. [Place of publication not identified]: [publisher not identified], 1944.
• Damiron, Charles. Majoliques Italiennes. N.p., 1944.
• Wixom, William and Henry H. Hawley. "Annual Report for 1965." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 53, no. 6 (June 1966): 137-71.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.