Sent unexpectedly by a friend, a cobalt-blue footed cup holds a backstory steeped in Italian Renaissance history.
One Christmas, a few years ago, Alex Papachristidis sent me a bowl with a footed base, a sort of a goblet of cobalt-blue glass. “I don’t know what it is, but I saw it and thought of you,” said the ebullient Manhattan-based interior decorator, with whom I wrote a book called The Elegant Life: Rooms That Welcome and Inspire (Rizzoli, 2022). He had pulled it out of storage, packed it safely, and sent it on its merry way. A few clicks later—thank God for Google—I discovered that Papachristidis had given me a relatively small Renaissance revival vessel, likely late nineteenth century, a copy of the famous fifteenth-century Barovier drinking cup (once a star of Moonraker, the 1979 James Bond flick, but that’s another story). The original cup is displayed at the Museo del Vetro on Venice’s fabled island of Murano. Another friend, a dealer, admires that repository greatly, and he has sent me photographs of its beautiful contents, among them a large centerpiece made in the form of a garden. The bowl, though smaller, is decorated, like the original, with gilding and hand-painted enamelwork, the pictures depicting a serious couple—marriage is a solemn business, after all, though the bride wears a hat with what appear to be long pointed ears—as well as allegorical scenes meant to offer edifying relationship lessons. (My favorite scene depicts bare-breasted bathers splashing in the fountain of youth, beneath a columnar water source, a candy-striped column that resembles a barber’s pole.) Reproductions have been made forever. They still are today, because Barovier & Toso, a descendant of the long-ago firm, makes it and variations in the same furnace. Antique and vintage examples are widely available, easily found at auction houses, souvenir shops, online, et cetera, but no altar-bound pair that I know actually uses one. So for me and my husband, when the Barovier reproduction isn’t sitting on a chimney piece, it holds Pepperidge Farm cheddar-cheese goldfish quite nicely.
