This presentation salver or soucoupe forms a pair with O61 of the Dauphin’s Treasure, both being made from a single piece of lapis lazuli. It has a round bowl with a flat bottom, low sides and a short turned stem resting on a small foot. A silver mount runs around the rim. Its profile, simple as it is, points to a work made in Milan, perhaps close to the Miseroni. It preserves the silversmith’s mark IR, possibly Jean Royel. In the inventory of the Grand Dauphin’s collection at Versailles, no mounting is described for it. This may have been added after the inventory was completed in 1689, but there are no marginal annotations to indicate this. Silver rings of this type, based on the designs of Jean Bérain the Elder (1640-1711), consist of an internal band of palmettes and an external one of gadroons separated by mouldings.

Despite its simplicity, this salver and its pair (O61) are noteworthy pieces, since their execution in a single block requires a piece of stone large enough to make two vessels at the same time, leaving them with a perfectly uniform appearance and design. It may be that the choice of the variant of lapis lazuli with abundant calcite veins, inferior in quality to the traditional intense blue with a high concentration of azurite, was made deliberately in a search for a novel aesthetic appearance. The vein used could have come from the region of Badakhshan in Afghanistan, where similar veins are still extracted today, or from Lake Baikal, an area where lapis lazuli is found with an abundant calcite content. Its gentle colouring in any case contributes to the rare beauty of the piece’s final appearance.

This salver and its pair, O61, bear the mark IR, attributed to the silversmith Jean Royel, on the back of the mount. It is accompanied by the marks of the fermier (assay master) Jacques Léger, active between October 1687 and December 1691 (L. Arbeteta, in press).