APPARENTLY UNMARKED, LATE 16TH CENTURY

The wealthy mathematician and university professor Alfred Pringsheim (1850–1941) owned one of Germany’s most important private collections of Renaissance art, especially noted for its majolica and silver. He formed the collection between 1880 and the First World War. Pringsheim commissioned a mansion to be built in Munich by Berlin architects which he furnished in a southern German–Swiss late Renaissance style. Unusually for the time his collection was displayed on open shelves, the silver in recesses set into the panelled walls of the dining room. The nef can be seem amongst other drinking cups in a photograph dated circa 1916. Pringsheim's taste was very different to that of the Rothschild's who preferred gold and silver-gilt objects with opulent figural ornamentation, much of it enamelled and adorned with gems. He favoured simpler forms chased, embossed and finely engraved or etched. Alfred Pringsheim's first purchase in 1889 was a stacking beaker and German Renaissance silver dominated the collection. In the late 1920s, Pringsheim sold several pieces to the industrialist Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. In 1938 Alfred Pringsheim's collection was seized by the Nazis and acquired by the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in 1941 before being restituted to the heirs after the war, when nef was acquired by the Thyssen Collection.