Rock crystal drinking vessel with stem motifs and scroll-shaped handles
Ca. 1610. Rock crystal / Hyaline quartz, Enamel, Gold.Room 079B
A vessel composed of two pieces of rock crystal and three enamelled gold mounts. The elongated bowl has a segmental arch profile with eight gadroons separated by concave gadroons and arrises. The base, joined by a ring mount, seems to be a single piece, and has a short stem with a knop and a flat oval foot. The decoration consists of gadroons on the lower part, and garlands, whorls and horns of abundance with fruit above, all symmetrically arranged. Two mounts join the bowl to the transversally placed handles in the form of cleft S-shaped scrolls. The piece has been attributed to the Miseroni workshop.
It is proportionally similar to the drinking bowl O85 and the vessel O45 of the Dauphin’s Treasure in the way the convex gadroons are separated by very thin concave ones with sharp edges. The handles follow the same model as those on vessel O21 at the Prado. In this case they are of gold enamelled in white, and are datable to the first half of the 17th century. This model is also found in the Prague court, as on the vase with a mask, the work of Ottavio Miseroni, that is preserved in the Kunstkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, inv. 1641, and was made in Prague in the first decade of the 17th century. According to Arbeteta, the piece could have been made during the same period as these other examples, whose carving was executed within the circle of the Miseroni family in Milan or Prague.
Original state: Juan Laurent y Minier, “Tasse ovale, cristal de roche taillé et gravé, montures d’or avecé mail, XVIe siècle, règne de Henri III”, c. 1879. Museo del Prado, HF0835/39.
Arbeteta Mira, Letizia, El tesoro del Delfín: alhajas de Felipe V recibidas por herencia de su padre Luis, Gran Delfín de Francia, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2001, p.216