A dish made up of a piece of rock crystal with a deep bowl and a broad brim, around which there runs a gilt silver mount with gadroons on the outer strip and engraved palmette motifs on the inside. In the centre is a crude engraving of a crowned eagle, abased, with its beak turned to its right. The glasswork is ancient, probably Roman, and the eagle was perhaps engraved around the 14th century to represent the arms of some European royal house, such as those of Swabia or Poland. As Arbeteta pointed out, the piece seems identifiable with descriptions in various historic documents ranging from the Dauphinate of Charles V of France (1338-1380) to the Spanish inventories of the Dauphin’s Treasure. In this respect, it is perhaps the best documented object in the Prado’s collection, and one of the most frequently recorded among the treasure of the kings of France.

According to Arbeteta, it appeared in the Brussels inventory of Emperor Charles I of Spain and V of Germany. To judge by the description, the mount would then have been Gothic in style, with groups of pearls arranged in trefoils, and made after 1380. Were this theory to be confirmed, the piece would be one of prime importance among the European collections.

The much later silver gilt mount that now protects the edge of the dish is Parisian. It was made before the piece was described in the Versailles inventory, possibly in the same year of 1689, and it is marked with the initials IR, attributed to the silversmith Jean Royel. The mark is identical to the one on the mounts of the two lapis lazuli salvers in the Dauphin’s Treasure, O-60 and O-61, which still lacked their mounts in 1689. This indicates that the silversmith IR worked after that date on the Grand Dauphin’s collection. The mark which accompanies the silversmith’s hallmark is the charge mark of the assay master (fermier) Pierre Pointeau, active from December 1691 to January 1697. The pattern of the fretwork, similar to that of the lapis lazuli salvers O-60 and O-61, bears a resemblance to that of a project for a dish with the royal arms that was left unfinished by the Parisian goldsmith Claude Ballin the Elder upon his death in 1678.

The Museo del Prado has the photograph by Juan Laurent y Minier, Plateau circulaire, en cristal de roche gravé, montures d’argent doré, XVIIe siècle, règne de Louis XIII, c. 1879. Museo del Prado, HF0835/49 (L. Arbeteta, in press).