Capodimonte Style Porcellane Principe Flower Seller Porcelain House and Figure. Charming, quaint appearance in biscuit porcelain with colorful paint. Label on back near bottom. The sculptor Luciano Cazzola and the painter Sergio Traforetti founded Porcellane Principe in 1980. Lino Gobbi, a mold maker and designer, later joined the company. Their Capo di Monte line is a tribute to the rich porcelain history of the Naples region, although their company is headquartered near Vicenza, Veneto. 

Size: 11 1/4 x 9 x 10 1/4 in. 

#6222 . 

Capodimonte porcelain (also known as Capo di Monte) is porcelain created by the Capodimonte porcelain manufactory (Real Fabbrica di Capodimonte), which operated in Naples, Italy beginning in 1743 when the newly arrived Bourbon King Charles VII of Naples and his wife Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony founded the factory in the grounds of the Palace of Capodimonte. The queen’s grandfather, Augustus II the Strong, had founded the Meissen porcelain factory which led European porcelain, and they recruited the Flemish chemist Livio Ottavio Schepers and the painter Giovanni Caselli to start. The Florentine sculptor Giuseppe Gricci joined as chief modeller; and within a few years the factory was internationally famous for its molded figurines, the translucent soft-paste being much harder to fire than German hard-paste pieces, and therefore more desirable and rare. In 1759 the entire factory was moved to Madrid, becoming the Real Fábrica del Buen Retiro after Charles inherited the Spanish throne from his brother. Despite its short-lived period in Naples, the reputation was so great that the name is often claimed and used for porcelain made in other factories in or around Naples. The first was the new royal factory established by Charles’ son Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, which manufactured from 1771 until 1806 and was known for Neoclassical subjects and styles, with their figures in unglazed biscuit porcelain. Officially the Naples Royal Porcelain Manufactory (Real fabbrica delle porcellane di Napoli or Real Fabbrica Ferdinandea), production was discontinued when Napoleon invaded the Kingdom of Naples, but these names and imitations of the original figures and forms have also been in continuous use since the early 19th Century, with local factories piggybacking off their success for a wide variety of wares in a great range of quality.