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Lot Essay
The silver wine cistern served the practical purpose of cooling wine and was almost always the centrepiece of the buffet. Wine was decanted from casks into silver flasks or bottles which were then cooled in the cistern using water from a fountain positioned above. Magnificent examples of this system of function and display the Hanover Cistern and Fountain, made for George I as Elector of Hanover, by Lewin Dedecke, circa 1710 (sold Christie's, New York, 23 October 2000, lot 486) and a massive German wine-cistern by Philipp Jakob Drentwett V, Augsburg, circa 1710 (sold The Exceptional Sale, Christie's, 4 July 2013, lot 47).
The custom of arranging cisterns, fountains, ewers and sideboard-dishes to form a display during a formal banquet grew out of the medieval practice of placing silver to be used for serving wine on trestle tables on the side of the room. As noble and royal life became less itinerant during the seventeenth century, the silver buffet became a permanent arrangement. At a banquet, the various dishes comprising each course were highly dressed and decorated, and were piled on the dining table leaving little room for display of silver vessels. Therefore a buffet became essential for the elaborate and costly displays of plate so necessary to signify the status of the host. In some German courts this was one an immense scale. For example, the royal Hanoverian silver, now on display in the William I. Koch Gallery at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the buffet in the Berlin Schloss, which has survived in almost original form since the end of the seventeenth century and is some twenty-three feet high.
The custom of arranging cisterns, fountains, ewers and sideboard-dishes to form a display during a formal banquet grew out of the medieval practice of placing silver to be used for serving wine on trestle tables on the side of the room. As noble and royal life became less itinerant during the seventeenth century, the silver buffet became a permanent arrangement. At a banquet, the various dishes comprising each course were highly dressed and decorated, and were piled on the dining table leaving little room for display of silver vessels. Therefore a buffet became essential for the elaborate and costly displays of plate so necessary to signify the status of the host. In some German courts this was one an immense scale. For example, the royal Hanoverian silver, now on display in the William I. Koch Gallery at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the buffet in the Berlin Schloss, which has survived in almost original form since the end of the seventeenth century and is some twenty-three feet high.