FIRST QUARTER 17TH CENTURY

The enameled boss in the interior of this cup may have served, along with the bright convex flutes of the sides, to show the clarity of the wine, much in the same way as a raised boss in the bottom of a traditional wine taster functions. These raised bosses originally derived from the often elaborate cage-type bosses intended to hold a bezoar stone in the so-called "Poison Cups" of the Renaissance period. A similarly formed bowl, circa 1620 by a Spanish silversmith working in Bogotá, New Granada (now Colombia), was sold at Christie's, New York, 16 April 1999, lot 161, having been recovered in 1985 from the shipwreck of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha which sank off the coast of the Florida Keys in 1622. A gold "poison cup" with a bezoar stone, also recovered from the wreck of the Atocha in 1973, is in the collection the Maritime Heritage Society, Key West, Florida.