older, after the Greeks and the Christians had exhausted all that
was beautiful in shape and substance of clay vases, the art seemed
to die out, and the potters and the pottery painters died with it,
or at any rate went to sleep for a great many centuries, whilst
soldiers and prelates, nobles and mercenaries, were trampling to
and fro all over the land and disputing it, and carrying fire and
torch, steel and desolation, with them in their quarrels and
covetousness. But now, the reign of the late good duke, great
Federigo, having been favorable to the Marches (as we call his
province now), the potters and pottery painters, with other gentle
craftsmen, had begun to look up again, and the beneficent fires of
their humble ovens had begun to burn in Castel Durante, in Pesaro,
in Faenza, in Gubbio, and in Urbino itself. The great days had not
yet come: Maestro Giorgio was but a youngster, and Orazio Fontane
not born, nor the clever baker Prestino either, nor the famous Fra
Xanto; but there was a Don Giorgio even then in Gubbio, of whose
work, alas! one plate now at the Louvre is all we have; and here
in the ducal city on the hill rich and noble things were already
being made in the stout and lustrous majolica that was destined to
acquire later on so wide a ceramic fame. Jars and bowls and
platters, oval dishes and ewers and basins, and big-bodied, metal-
welded pharmacy vases were all made and painted at Urbino whilst
Raffaelle Sanzio was running about on rosy infantine feet. There
was a master-potter of the Montefeltro at that time, one Maestro
Benedetto Ronconi, whose name had not become world-renowned as
Orazio Fontane's and Maestro Giorgio's did in the following
century, yet who in that day enjoyed the honor of all the duchy,
and did things very rare and fine in the Urbino ware. He lived
within a stone's throw of Giovanni Sanzio, and was a gray-haired,
handsome, somewhat stern and pompous man, now more than middle-