Desco da parto

The Triumph of Love, a twelve-sided desco da parto by Apollonio di Giovanni di Tommaso and Marco del Buono, ca 1453-55 (National Gallery, London)

A painted desco da parto (a birth tray or birth salver) was an important symbolic gift on the occasion of a successful birth in late medieval and Early Modern Florence and Siena.^[1] The surviving painted deschi represented in museum collections were commissioned by elite families, but inventories show that birth trays and other special birth objects like embroidered pillows were kept long after the successful birth in families of all classes: when Lorenzo de' Medici died, the inventory shows that the desco da parto given by his father to his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, at her lying-in,^[2] was hanging in his private quarters to the day of his death.^[3] A desco da parto need not be specially commissioned; they were produced in workshops in series for stock, often being personalised with a coat-of-arms when they were bought.

Infant mortality was highest during the crucial first days, when the mother might also succumb to childbed fever. A successful childbirth was lavishly celebrated. Sons would one day assert the family interests, whether in modest workshop or banking house; daughters would share the household's work until they were married and would cement the exogamous ties that stabilized Tuscan family position at every social level. Painted childbirth trays began to appear about 1370, in the generation following the Black Death, when the tenuousness of life was more vivid than ever.^[4] In the fifteenth century, D.C. Ahl found, at least one appears in almost half of all inventories she surveyed.^[5] The tray, often covered with a protective cloth, served to present gifts of delicacies: a maid brings a cloth-covered desco with two carafes of water and wine to fortify Saint Anne in Paolo Uccello's fresco of the Birth of the Virgin (1436), in the Chapel of the Annunciation, Duomo of Prato,^[6] Raiment might be ceremoniously brought into the specially-decorated bedchamber where the new mother lay: in a desco da parto by Masaccio of 1427,^[7] the tray and a covered cup are preceded by a pair of trumpeters flying banners with the Florentine gigli. In fact in patrician households the bed was often placed in a reception room for the occasion (if there was not one already in such a room, after the fashion of the French and Burgundian courts), and the mother lay there while receiving visits from her friends over several days.

The Medici-Tornabuoni desco da parto painted for the birth of Lorenzo de' Medici, 1449; the framing is modern (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

For the painted trays made for the elite on these joyous occasions, in general, both sides of the tray are painted, the upper side with a suitable allegory or a scene from Scripture or hagiography,^[8] the underside with a simplified subject.^[9] A favourite subject was the Birth of the Virgin. Inscriptions in the field or round the rim sometimes provide the date of the fortunate event,^[10] providing art historians with a useful fixed point. Like some other types of art, such as the "Otto prints", desci were mostly expected to be decorated in what was considered to be feminine taste, although how the design was selected is unclear.

Workshops that produced deschi da parto were often also manuscript illuminators^[11] and painters of the panels that were incorporated into the fronts and ends of quattrocento cassoni. Such a workshop was that of the unidentified "Master of the Adimari cassone", which also produced the desco da parto showing youths playing at civettino in an urban setting, in Palazzo Davanzati, Florence.^[12]

The format of the desco, usually about 50 to 60 cm across, is with twelve or sixteen sides, or from about 1430, round,^[13] enclosed within a slightly raised lip integral to the panel. Only about two dozen desci survive, some now with the surfaces sawn apart.^[14] In inventories they are often described as "broken" or "old", and most apparently were used as trays until too scruffy to keep. As the 15th century continued they were gradually replaced as gifts by pieces of majolica, although the Uffizi has an example of 1524 by Jacopo Pontormo.

The Legion of Honor in San Francisco has an elaborate Italian Birth Salver.^[15] This rare piece is one of only about two dozen surviving examples of Florentine presentation pieces commissioned and it was given in celebration of the union of two families at the same time of the birth of a child.The example in San Francisco is an excellent example of preservation and remains intact, whereas many examples have been sawed in two to maximize their potential market value.

The story of Diana and Actaeon. San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum

This particular Italian Birth Salver was painted about 1400 by Lorenzo di Niccolo, a Florentine painter who was active from 1391-1412. Niccolo relied on classical iconography and illustrated Diana, goddess of the hunt.^[16] Narrative scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses decorate the obverse side of the Birth Salver.^[17] Diana appears in the foreground clothed in a dark, broaded robe and carrying a falcon; at the right, her nymphs pursue a boar. At the top of the painting, Diana and her nymphs are bathing in a pool of water when the mortal Actaeon happens upon the naked goddess. For offending the virgin deity, Actaeon was transformed into a stag to be hunted down by his own dogs. His fate is illustrated on the left side, where hounds chase a deer. On the reverse side stands the allegorical figure of Justice with two family coats of arms while holding a scale and a sword.

Notes

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External links

• City Review - Feature on 2009 exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (MMA New York and Fort Worth, Texas) - trays at the end.