Jim Peake
Head of Department
Lot 4
An early Venetian enamelled armorial pilgrim flask, circa 1500
29 September 2020, 10:30 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £31,312.50 inc. premium
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An early Venetian enamelled armorial pilgrim flask, circa 1500
Of typical flattened ovoid bottle form with a tall slender neck, applied to the sides with two opposing pairs of looped gilt lugs, decorated on both sides with the striped arms of the Nerli family flanked by foliate scrollwork in red, white, blue and ochre, the neck with two gilt imbricated bands embellished with blue dots between white dot borders, the spreading foot with a formal border of ovals in blue, the folded rim with a band of red dashes, 29.7cm high
Footnotes
Provenance
Lady 'Lili' Maria Elisabeth Augusta Cartwright (née von Sandizell)
Thence by descent to her son, William Cornwallis Cartwright, Aynhoe Park, Oxfordshire
Thence by family descent to the present owner
The Nerli were a prominent Florentine family and this flask may have been commissioned for any one of several of its members living around 1500. The earliest possibility is perhaps Tanai de'Nerli (1427-1498), a wealthy ambassador who commissioned Filippino Lippi to paint the famous late 15th century renaissance altarpiece of The Madonna with St Catherine of Alexandria and St Martin of Tours (Pala de' Nerli) in the church of Santo Spirito, Florence, in which he and his wife Nanna are shown as kneeling patrons. He had ten sons and six daughters, many of whom married into the Medici family.
The form of flasks such as this is probably derived from 13th century Islamic prototypes. Two armorial flasks in the Museo Civico Mediaeval, Bologna, which appear to commemorate the marriage of Alessandro Bentivoglio and Ippolita Sforza in 1492, would appear to be among the earliest datable examples, see Astone Gasparetto, Il Vetro di Murano (1958), p.83 and fig.21, and Giovanni Mariacher, Glass from Antiquity to the Renaissance (1970), p.119, no.54. An example from the Biemann Collection, formerly in the Rothschild Collection in Paris, is illustrated by Barovier Mentasti et al., Mille Anni Di Arte Del Vetro A Venezia (1982), p.87, no.81. Another bearing these arms from the Mühleib Collection was sold by Bonhams on 2 May 2013, lot 3.
Pilgrim flasks bearing Italian coats of arms are rare and would appear to be slightly earlier than those recorded with Germanic arms. A flask bearing the arms of Albertino della Rovere, who was Bishop of Pesaro from 1508-13, is in the Corning Museum of Glass (accession no. 59.3.19). Another from the Ernesto Wolf Collection bearing the arms of a cardinal from the Pucci family, circa 1513-31, is illustrated by Brigitte Klesse and Hans Mayr, European Glass from 1500-1800 (1987), no.5. Further comparable flasks with Germanic arms are cited by Klesse and Meyr (1987) in their discussion of this flask.
The enamel decoration on the present flask is restricted to a palette of just four colours. Comparable foliate scrollwork decoration in the same palette is found on a pilgrim flask in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 1975.1.1167), illustrated and discussed by Dwight Lanmon and David Whitehouse, Glass in the Robert Lehman Collection (1993), pp.21-3, no.4.
