A dish from the Cantagalli workshop in the British Museum

The British Museum, London has recently been given a ceramic dish, marked for the Cantagalli workshop in Florence, Italy, which in the late nineteenth century was famous for its high-quality historicist wares. The dish copies a fritware ceramic made at Iznik, formerly known as Nicaea) in the Ottoman Turkish empire in the late sixteenth century. The original, which is now in the Wallace Collection, London, had been highly regarded by collectors and critics since the 1860s. Curators debated as to where Iznik fritware had been produced. The British Museum's acquisition demands a reexamination of these concerns. Together with its prototype, it documents orientalist taste, collecting history and the sources used by the Cantagalli workshop.