Marriage Beaker (late 1400s): Art, History and Details

Marriage Beaker (late 1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

By the mid-1400s the word lattimo had come to mean glass made milk-like by the addition of opacifying materials, such as an oxide of tin. It was imitative of Chinese porcelain. Only fourteen surviving pieces of lattimo vessels are recorded. These beakers may have been intended as betrothal or wedding gifts. This one is enameled with idealized portrait heads of a young man and woman. Such portrait heads of young women were also a feature of Italian Maiolica, especially those at Deruta (see "love dishes" in Gallery 219).

Object facts

• Title: Marriage Beaker
• Date: late 1400s
• Culture: Italy, Venice
• Type: Glass
• Technique: opaque glass (milk glass or lattimo), enameled
• Dimensions: Overall: 10.2 x 7.4 cm (4 x 2 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1955.70

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry S. Venetian Tradition: Catalogue of the Exhibition. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1956.
• Francis, Henry Sayles. Venetian Tradition: Catalogue of the Exhibition. [Cleveland, Ohio]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1956.
• Foote, Helen. "An Enameled glass Marriage Beaker." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 43, no. 6 (June 1956): 118-120.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.