Desco da parto

The Triumph of Love, a twelve-sided desco da parto from the workshop of Antonio di Giovanni, 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.

Notes

1. ^ The recent monograph is Cecilia De Carli, I deschi da parto e la pittura del primo Rinascimento toscano Turin, 1997; Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, "The Medici-Tornabuoni Desco da Parto in Context", Metropolitan Museum Journal 33 (1998:137-151) note 24, lays to rest the common assumption that these trays were made to celebrate a marriage; she never encountered a desco da nozze in any 15th-century inventory.
2. ^ The Medici-Tornabuoni desco da parte, painted by Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, called "Scheggia", the brother of Masaccio, with a Triumph of Fame, is conserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 1995.1995.7.
3. ^ Musacchio 1998 note 3 quotes from a 1475 inventory "3 paia di schodelle [pairs of soup plates] di maiolicha da donna di parto", at a time when the testator's children were fifteen and sixteen years old.
4. ^ Musacchio 1998:140.
5. ^ Ahl, "Renaissance birth salvers and the Richmond Judgment of Solomon", Studies in Iconography 7 (1981:157-84) p. 158.
6. ^ Noted by Musacchio 1998:141; the fresco is illustrated in Georges Duby, ed. A History of Private Life, II: Revelations of the Medieval World (1988) following p. 254.
7. ^ Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; illustrated in Duby 1988 p. 248.
8. ^ The earliest painted illustration of a novella of Boccaccio is on a Florentine desco da parto with the arms of a Pisan family, made ca 1410 and conserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (on-line catalogue entry).
9. ^ The Medici-Tornabuoni tray is painted with the feather device of Piero de' Medici and the coats of arms of the Medici and Tornabuoni families.
10. ^ A desco da parto dated 25 April 1428, in the New-York Historical Society collection, is attributed to the prolific manuscript illuminator and occasional panel painter, the Florentine Bartolomeo di Fruosino, in Paul F. Watson, "A Desco da parto by Bartolomeo di Fruosino" The Art Bulletin 56.1 (March 1974:4-9); another desco by Bartolomeo is Musacchio 1998 fig. 6.
11. ^ Bartolomeo di Fruosino is an example of an illuminator who also produced panel paintings.
12. ^ Illustrated in Duby 1988, p.241.
13. ^ Musacchio 1998:141; Robert Olson, Florentine Tondo, 2000:29, compares deschi with the circular format of a tondo.
14. ^ Catalogue entry for example in San Francisco: Nash, Steven A.; Masterworks of European painting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, pp. 38-39, Hudson Hills, 1999, ISBN 1555951821, 9781555951825. Google books

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.