This Friday, the Enamels Room at the Frick Collection will reopen to the public, after several months of refurbishing. Included among its bronzes, Limoges dishes, and paintings by Duccio, Piero della Francesca, and others will be an entirely new addition: a splendid majolica charger that once belonged to Baron Adolphe de Rothschild and that has now been donated to the museum by Dianne Modestini, in memory of her late husband, Mario.

To an eminent degree, this work exhibits one of the great charms of majolica: Though there is a general interpenetration between paintings and works of this sort, both in form and in subject matter, majolica, unlike works on canvas, copper, wood, or paper, is all but indestructible. Once the metallic oxide paints are fired into the earthenware surface of the object and once it has been glazed over, the dazzling colors acquire a kind of immortality. They cannot be altered or corrupted. They cannot fade or disappear. We can say of the Frick’s new acquisition, as we can say of too few Old Master paintings, that it looks as it did on the day of its creation, indeed, as it did in the mind of its creator.

The arrival of the majolica plate marks the Frick’s first acquisition of a work of this kind. Though Henry Clay Frick did not collect it, majolica was popular among American Gilded Age collectors. After World War I, plates similar to the one now at the Frick lost cachet. Even so, no matter what the fashion of the day, the artistry of the form is enduring.

The Frick’s charger is a fine example of the type of majolica that has its remote origins in China and various Islamic cultures. The name majolica is of uncertain origin, but it may derive from the Balearic island of Majorca, or from the Spanish port city of Malaga. But by the middle of the 16th century, its tin-glazed wares were being produced in several Italian centers, such as Florence, Faenza, Gubbio, and Urbino. It was in this last city, in Umbria, that the Frick charger was made. The high quality of its finish suggests that it was made under the direction of Orazio Fontana, if not by him personally.

Dating from the 1560s, the charger is known as an istoriato: It is decorated not merely with ornamental patternings, but with an identifiable subject, the famed Judgment of Paris, among other scenes from classical mythology. The treatment of that story is based on an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, after a lost original by Raphael. In the middle ground, on the slopes of Mount Olympus, we see Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, to whom the shepherd Paris is handing the apple of victory. In the sky above them, Apollo drives the chariot of the sun. To the left of Paris is Hermes, or Mercury, and on the right-hand side of the composition is a river god.

But a strong decorative component also remains in this plate, in the richly ornamental border, with its sinuous vines and impish harpies. All of them were based on the grotesques that Raphael incorporated into his adornments of the Vatican loggias toward the end of his life, around 1520. The designs had entered the bloodstream of European art with the rediscovery of Nero’s Domus Aurea at the end of the 15th century. But the most immediate source for these surrounding patterns on the charger, as has been proved by Charlotte Vignon, the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Frick, is the pattern books of the mid-16th century French architect and designer Androuet du Cerceau, a Mannerist master inspired by the Italianate example of the School of Fontainebleau.

All of these influences, and more, combine to inform the Frick’s new acquisition. In its way, it is a summation of a number of strains that were floating around Europe in the second half of the 16th century. That is to say that it can fairly stand as an example of International Mannerism. As such it does not have or need the energetic, fervid commitment to Mannerism that we find in men such as Michelangelo and Parmigianino. Rather, it is all attenuation and grace, the sort of thing intended to keep a drowsy emperor, or king, or captain of industry awake. Surely we are justified in surmising that, early on, it was judged to be too beautiful for anyone ever to eat off of it.