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Lot Essay
The present cup was recovered in 1985 from the Spanish galleon, Nuestra Señora de Atocha, which sunk off the Florida Keys in 1622. The silver cargo of the Atocha, thought to have been made by Spanish silversmiths in Bogotá, Cartagena and Lima, has yielded new information on the marks used in those cities. The previously unrecorded mark on the present cup, a crowned pomegranate (granada), refers to the colony of New Granada, now Colombia, and has recently been identified as that of Bogotá.
The boss in the interior of this cup was probably originally brightly enamelled and may have served, along with the bright convex flutes of the sides, to show the clarity of the wine, much in the same was as a raised boss in the bottom of a traditional wine taster does. Nevertheless these raised bosses ultimately derive from the often elaborate cage-type bosses intended to hold a bezoar stone in the so-called "Poison Cups" of the Renaissance period. One such gold cup, recovered from the wreck of the Atocha in 1973, is on display at the Maritime Heritage Society in Key West, Florida. Another fluted cup with re-arranged stem and bezoar stone is in the Art Institute of Chicago. For a discussion of these cups and their possible function, see Christopher Hartop, "New Light on Spanish Seventeenth Century Silver," The Silver Society Journal, I, 1990, pp. 5-12.
A very similar lobed cup appears in Juan Bautista de Espinosa's Still Life with Silver-gilt Salvers, illustrated in Hartop, op. cit., fig. 1. Another cup of the same form, described as a catavinos and hallmarked for Zaragoza, is illustrated in A. Fernandez et al., Enciclopedia de la Plata Española y Virreinal Americana, 1985, p. 432, pl. 1543.
The mark is illustrated in Cristina Esteras Martín, Marcas de Platería Hispanoamericana, 1992, nos. 348 and 349, pp. 154-155.
The boss in the interior of this cup was probably originally brightly enamelled and may have served, along with the bright convex flutes of the sides, to show the clarity of the wine, much in the same was as a raised boss in the bottom of a traditional wine taster does. Nevertheless these raised bosses ultimately derive from the often elaborate cage-type bosses intended to hold a bezoar stone in the so-called "Poison Cups" of the Renaissance period. One such gold cup, recovered from the wreck of the Atocha in 1973, is on display at the Maritime Heritage Society in Key West, Florida. Another fluted cup with re-arranged stem and bezoar stone is in the Art Institute of Chicago. For a discussion of these cups and their possible function, see Christopher Hartop, "New Light on Spanish Seventeenth Century Silver," The Silver Society Journal, I, 1990, pp. 5-12.
A very similar lobed cup appears in Juan Bautista de Espinosa's Still Life with Silver-gilt Salvers, illustrated in Hartop, op. cit., fig. 1. Another cup of the same form, described as a catavinos and hallmarked for Zaragoza, is illustrated in A. Fernandez et al., Enciclopedia de la Plata Española y Virreinal Americana, 1985, p. 432, pl. 1543.
The mark is illustrated in Cristina Esteras Martín, Marcas de Platería Hispanoamericana, 1992, nos. 348 and 349, pp. 154-155.