Middle East, Metalwork. The Priuli Wine-Cup, cup with pedestal foot and handles, both added later in Italy, brass with engraved and silver-inlaid decoration in horizontal registers of flowers, foliate scrollwork and cartouches of cruciforms and Arabic poetry inscriptions, Egypt or Syria, 1400-1500

Wine cup with two handles and a high foot; both the handles and the foot are separate pieces which were added later. Brass, incised and inlaid with silver in bands of vegetal ornament. Two prominent Arabic inscriptions on the side of the bowl come from a poem which also appears in examples of Mamluk metalwork, while the inside of the bowl was later incised with the coat of arms of the Priuli family of Venice set within imitation-Islamic vegetal ornament.

The cup proper is a traditional Middle Eastern shape, while the foot, which was made separately, may have been shaped in Venice. Both were probably sent to be decorated at the same Syrian workshop. The handles are a later addition (late 16th century).

This object belongs to a genre of metalwork long known as 'Veneto-Saracenic' on the presumption that these elaborately inlaid wares were made by Muslim craftsmen ('Saracens') working in Venice. While this theory is no longer considered tenable, the trade links between Venice and the Middle East were indeed strong, and the Mamluk export industry based in Damascus was a major source of inlaid brassware for the Venetian market in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The popularity of these wares eventually inspired Venetian metalworkers to develop a host of imitation-Islamic brasses of their own.

Foot added in Venice about 1450-1500, also the handles 1550-1600

311-1854