Glass Cooler, from a Service Made for Pauline Bonaparte and Prince Camillo Borghese
Martin-Guillaume Biennais (Probably after designs by Charles Percier (born France, 1764–1838) and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine (born France,…)
1809–19
- Medium
- Gilded silver
- Classification
- Metalwork
- Dimensions
- 12.7 × 22.4 × 33 cm (5 × 8 13/16 × 13 in.); 12.7 × 22.3 × 32.8 cm (5 × 8 3/4 × 12 7/8 in.)
- Culture
- Paris
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Applied Arts of Europe
- Credit line
- Gift of Mrs. Charles V. Hickox
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The cool, bright nature of silver is exploited to great effect in this bowl, or verrière. Its decorative motif was also meant to create a chilly impression, showing swans, cattails, and playful dolphins above a band of aquatic plants. When this piece was made, guests at elegant dinner parties customarily consumed menus of many courses, each with its own carefully selected accompaniment from the wine cellar. In the days before modern refrigeration, serving chilled drinks was not as simple a task as it is today: the glasses themselves first had to be cooled on a bed of ice and then filled with vintages that were cooling in their own ice-filled silver containers. This verrière is part of a larger dinner service made for Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon, on the occasion of her marriage to the Roman nobleman Camillo Borghese, Sixth Prince of Sulmona. The coat of arms of the Borghese family is prominently displayed. Its iconography—an eagle above a winged dragon, surmounted by a crown—is somewhat obscure, but this crest had served the family at least since a previous Camillo Borghese was elected pope (as Paul the Fifth) in 1605.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
