Treasured and embellished ostrich eggs litter what is one of the strangest side paths of decorative arts history—as well as one of the oldest. Their market has had its ups and downs over the millennia, but one thing they never are is boring.
Damaged ostrich-egg flask in the shape of a hawk with decorative silver mounts. Photograph by the Pippa Biddle.
We don’t like to say we have an ostrich problem; we prefer to think we are in search of an ostrich solution. Some years ago, we came into possession of an ostrich egg, dressed up in silver to look like a hawk. The collar inscription reads, in Dutch, “Vogel prys zyn eigen nest” or roughly “The bird praises its own nest.” The hallmarks are inscrutable. At some point before it entered our hands, the egg was broken, and this broken egg has left us with a curious problem. How does one put an egg back in the “nest,” so to speak.
The idea of a small silver costume for an empty ostrich egg may well give one pause. It is the sort of antique that leads to questions like “Who thought of doing this?” and “No, really, who spent time and money decorating this eggshell?” And yet, mankind’s passion for decorating enormous eggs has roots far back in our species’ infancy.
Renaissance ostrich-egg flask with silver mounts from the Kunstkammer of the Margraves and Grand Dukes of Baden-Baden, German, c. 1600. Photograph by Georg Laue, courtesy of Kunstkammer Georg Laue, Munich/London.
Archaeologists have found ostrich eggshells in human settlements dating back to the fifth millennium BC. Neolithic examples of decorated eggshells, often used as water vessels, are believed to have been taken by our remote ancestors from the nests of wild birds, predating long distance trade networks and ostrich husbandry. As commerce developed, fascination spread. Oversized eggs were traded into the Bronze and Iron Ages, and intricately decorated examples carved in Egyptian, Phoenician, or Minoan styles, or painted in striking colors, have been found at grave sites of the rich throughout the Mediterranean world.
The journey of a fragile egg from Egypt to Knossos, for instance, is especially astonishing when one considers how tremendously dangerous the work of an ancient ostrich tracker was. An adult ostrich can kill a human being with a single kick. And the ostrich isn’t alone in its territory. Lions and elephants raise the stakes in the hunt for an egg. Even after humans began to rear ostriches in captivity during the Bronze Age, the eggs remained coveted prizes. Granted, the fall of Rome and the collapse of the classical world dealt the decorated ostrich egg market a hard hit, but it rebounded over time, notably buoyed by the Catholic church in the late Middle Ages. Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro altarpiece (1472–1474), housed today in the Pinacoteca Brera of Milan, features what historian John Shearman called “probably the best-known egg in the whole of European art history.” So much scholarly attention has been paid to the egg, which can be seen in the painting’s architectural background, hanging by a chain, that Shearman remarked it “has virtually formed its own special branch of art history.” The practice of hanging an ostrich egg in a church is very old. A thirteenth-century bishop of Mende, Guillaume Durand, explained it as a marketing tool. Ostrich eggs were rare exotica, and having them in the building might draw more people in—a precursor to the Renaissance Wunderkammer.
Madonna and Child with Saints (Montefeltro Altarpiece) by Piero della Francesca (c. 1416–1492), 1472–1474. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.
With the dawning of the Renaissance and the destabilization of European society, keeping up with the Joneses (or failing to) could quickly become a matter of life or death for the elite, as the fragmentation of political authority led to the proliferation of combative princely courts. Being able to recruit into one’s service talented individuals who were fluent in the intellectual and artistic styles of the day was a key strategic maneuver in the war for prestige and power. Additionally, rulers spent outrageously to gather bits and bobs of the odd and the seldom seen. A farmer’s plow unearthing a fossil or a particularly striking stone could make the fortune of a family. In this climate of one-upmanship, nothing and no type of object remained remarkable for long, which brings us back to that egg dressed up as a falcon: even exotic eggs became just eggs and needed embellishments in order to attract the eye.
Punic vessel found in Punic Tomb 629, Almería, Spain, 8th–6th centuries BC. National Archeological Museum of Spain, Madrid; photograph courtesy of the REMAN3D digitization project.
Iron settings became silver ones and silver became gold; unadorned precious metals were engraved; simple engravings grew complex; banding took on feet, and wings, and maybe a head was added with eyes of precious stone. The egg turned into a coffer, into a cup, into the body of a statue of an ostrich. On and on and on it went. The forces that led the egg to change also led Martin Luther to publish his theses and kick off the Protestant reformation, cracking the Catholic West in two. In time, he brakes were pressed on heady consumption, even in the areas that remained under Catholic control. A feverish marketeering that was maybe only matched in recent memory with the rapid peak and then “poof ” of NFTs sputtered to a halt (albeit eggs held on for centuries, not days). The Age of the Enlightenment had little time for decadent fopperies, and many treasures of earlier eras appeared ludicrous, terribly difficult to explain outside the fevered milieu of expansive and confident luxury, and the production of bedazzled eggs fizzled out.
The style enjoyed a brief revival in the late Victorian era, though these more recent examples tend to sell for far less at auction, according to Benjamin Miller, host of this magazine’s podcast, Curious Objects, and director of research at S. J. Shrubsole. Renaissance examples are more desirable, and late medieval eggs are those sought after most of all—though good luck snapping one up. “You really never see ones that early outside of the collections of Oxford and Cambridge colleges,” Miller says, “I don’t recall ever having seen a medieval ostrich egg cup come to market during my time.”
Ostrich egg on a gilt-bronze base, with painted representation of an open-air dance with orchestra attributed to Jean-Étienne Le Bel (active 1767–1774), c. 1765–c. 1774. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
The Renaissance examples that do come up for sale can earn top dollar, with eggs from Christie’s and Sotheby’s selling for $96,508 in 2019 and $21,590 in 2024, respectively. Having original settings and an unbroken shell is critical for achieving such high prices—bad news for our egg. The decorative banding and figural work for such eggs were made to fit, so when a replacement is substituted the signs are usually quite apparent.
When the broken silver egg-hawk statue came into our hands, we assumed it would be easy to locate a replacement egg. As it turns out, even a millimeter matters in this fitting room. So, for now, we play a waiting game, having learned that, as Oscar Wilde once said, “an egg is always an adventure.”
