Object Description
A rare and finely decorated pair of porcelain ice cream pails on stands,
Viennese, Austrian, c.1860.
The decoration of the vases is outstanding: the four medallions representing neoclassical mythological scenes of Bacchus, Ceres, Ariadne and Europa surrounded by intricate motives “a grottesca” in vibrant colours and raised gilding.
Fashionable in antiquity, for example in the Pompeian “Third Style”, revisited among others in the Renaissance by Raphael in the Logge Vaticane, the “grottesche” acquired renewed popularity in the early 1800, with the extensive decorations for example of Villa Borghese and Palazzo Milzetti in Italy, or the Procuratie Nuove in Venice, formerly the Palazzo Reale. In in the mid XIX century Vienna, the Historismus movement revisited the idea too, an example is the 1862 decoration of newly built Renaissance Style Museum fur Angewandte Kunst.
Our vases are a refined example of fashionable, elegant decoration at work: the ice cream pail was used in the setting up of the dessert display: ice in the bottom compartment would preserve the sherbet or cream in the top for a reasonable time so it could be served and celebrated, as it was a rare delicacy.