Serpent-stemmed goblet

Venice or à la façon de Venise, ca 1600
Colourless and blue glass
Left upper wing damaged
Height 19.5 cm, diameter of foot 8.5 cm

Provenance: United Kingdom, private collection

This thin-walled serpent-stemmed goblet of colourless and blue glass radiates lightness, elegance and sophistication. At first glance it looks like an outstanding piece of Venetian glass. It owes its gracefully coquettish appearance primarily to the imaginative stem with its extravagantly rich and unusual decoration: fragile looped threading of colourless and blue glass in an elaborate design stands proud of the stem on four sides to buttress it. The design of the bell-shaped bowl is also unusual because it is decorated with trailed pinched ribbing. Only a handful of glasses of this type, most of which were made in the late sixteenth century or even later in the seventeenth, are held at public and private collections. The prime example is a similar serpent-stemmed goblet from the Ernesto Wolf Collection, which has found its way into the Landesmuseum Württemberg collections in Stuttgart: the bowl reveals the same trailed pinched ribbing and the stem boasts four similar wings of blue and colourless glass. Other comparable, although less ornate, glasses are held at the celebrated Helfried Krug Glass Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Corning Museum of Glass.