In 1884, two Renaissance plaques disappeared from public view after an auction; 142 years later, they were identified in an English family's hallway and sold for more than £100,000 in October 2026

Two 16th-century Italian Renaissance maiolica plaques that disappeared into a private collection in 1884 have sold for £100,000 at auction. The artworks were recently found hanging in the hallway of an English family home. The ceramic pieces were made in 1536 by well-known Italian artist Francesco Xanto Avelli. They had been hanging unnoticed for decades in a house in Dorset. The owners did not know their historical importance or value until they emailed a photograph to specialist auction house Woolley and Wallis in Salisbury, Wiltshire. The plaques were sold as two separate lots during a specialist auction of British and European ceramics. Together, they reached a total hammer price of £100,000, solving a mystery that had lasted 142 years.Rediscovery in a Dorset hallwayThe story of their return to the art market began when the owners decided to ask experts about the decorative plaques hanging on their wall. After looking at the digital photographs sent by the family, specialists at Woolley and Wallis quickly recognised the work of Xanto, one of the most famous ceramic artists of the Italian Renaissance. According to research published by Woolley and Wallis, both plaques carry the artist's signature initials, "F.X.R." They also have numbers showing that they are pieces 4 and 10 from a famous series of artworks telling the story of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. "When I opened the email containing images of the two plaques, I could hardly believe what I was looking at," said John Axford, chairman and European ceramics specialist at Woolley and Wallis, in statements released before the auction. "To find two lost pieces from such a famous series hanging quietly in a family hallway is the sort of discovery every auctioneer dreams about."Provenance tracing back to 1884The two plaques are part of a large series of around 39 maiolica panels painted by Xanto in 1536. At the time, he was working in Urbino, an important centre for Italian ceramics. Xanto was born in Rovigo around 1487. He became famous for his colourful tin-glazed ceramics, which showed scenes from classical mythology, ancient history, and biblical stories. Records from past auctions, studied by art historians, confirm that the two plaques were last seen at a public auction in London in 1884. They were bought at that sale by General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, a well-known 19th-century archaeologist, collector, and founder of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. After General Pitt Rivers died, the plaques stayed in his family. They were passed down through several generations until they reached his descendants in the West Country region of South West England. Over the next 140 years, the family gradually forgot where the artworks came from. The plaques were eventually treated as ordinary wall decorations and remained in the hallway until experts recently identified their importance.Historical significance and museum tiesItalian Renaissance maiolica pieces of this quality, with such clear historical records, are extremely rare outside major museum collections. Xanto's Cyrus the Great series is well documented in art history books, but very few complete panels from the series remain in private collections. According to information provided by Woolley and Wallis, two other matching plaques from the same 1536 series are held in the permanent collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris. They are listed under accession numbers OA9028 and OA9029. The tin-glaze method used by Xanto required great skill. Artists painted colours onto a glaze before it was fired. The pigments were absorbed immediately, which meant there was no chance to correct mistakes. Despite spending decades hanging in an open hallway, the rediscovered Dorset plaques have kept their bright colours and fine details. These include vivid blues, rich copper-lustre shades, and carefully painted details of the human body. The successful auction at Woolley and Wallis shows that historic English country homes can still reveal valuable lost treasures from Europe's artistic past.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.