Fonthill Vase

[3][2] It is an unusual "experimental" vase with applied relief decoration in the medallions, in the usual monochrome blueish-white Qingbai glaze.

[6] The vase was first part of a collection of Louis the Great of Hungary, who seems to have received it from a Chinese embassy on its way to visiting Pope Benedict XII in 1338.

[1] The vase was then mounted with a silver handle and base, transforming it into a ewer[4] and transferred as a gift to his Angevin kinsman Charles III of Naples in 1381.

It was only in 1959 that Arthur Lane, the ceramics curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, reconnected the vase with its earlier history.

[4] These vases testify to a lost era of exchanges between China and Europe during Medieval times, which can also be seen in pictorial arts with the adoption of some Chinese stylistic conventions in Western painting, such as in the works of Giotto and his followers.