Two-Handled "Oak Leaf" Drug Jar with Male and Female Portraits (1431): Art, History and Details

Two-Handled "Oak Leaf" Drug Jar with Male and Female Portraits (1431) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Giunta di Tugio (Italian, c. 1382–1450).

The work and its context

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

This two-handled drug container with a bulbous body and short neck belongs to a group of wares known as "oak leaf jars" because of their decoration. This example includes two profile busts amid blue-on-white oak leaves on branching stems. On each handle is a crutch, painted in green and manganese. This was the badge of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. The star motif below the crutch is the workshop mark of the ceramist Giunta di Tugio, known to have received this commission in the year 1431. In the early Middle Ages hospitals were simple hospices set up outside cities to offer food and lodging to pilgrims and travelers. The Santa Maria Nuova hospital, by the mid-1300s the largest in Florence, was the first hospital in that city dedicated primarily to caring for the sick.

Object facts

• Title: Two-Handled "Oak Leaf" Drug Jar with Male and Female Portraits
• Date: 1431
• Creator attribution: Giunta di Tugio (Italian, c. 1382–1450)
• Culture: Italy, Florence
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica)
• Dimensions: Overall: 20.4 cm (8 1/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Renaissance
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1943.54

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William. "Italian Majolica." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 31, no. 1 (January 1944): 7-15.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.