Venetian Marriage Beaker, c. 1480 – Porcelain Art Mug

In Venice around 1480 the glassmakers of Murano learned to make glass look like porcelain. They stirred an opacifier — an oxide of tin — into the melt until the metal turned milk-white and opaque, and called it lattimo. Chinese porcelain reached Europe then only as diplomatic gifts; it could not be bought at any price. Lattimo was the answer of a city that could make anything.

Fourteen lattimo vessels from that moment are recorded. This is one of them.

It is a beaker, and it was almost certainly a betrothal or wedding gift. It carries two enamelled roundels — a young man, and the young woman shown here: in profile, her hair bound and plaited, before a landscape of blue hills. Around them lies a ground of gilded scales, each holding a single blue bead, closed above and below by rows of turquoise and red enamel on gold. Below the rim ran a broad gilded band. The enamel stands raised on the glass, as it did the day it was fired.

For this re-edition the cylinder was mathematically unrolled and the ornament rebuilt at true proportion on white porcelain. Chipped enamel and worn gold were closed from the average of all surviving copies of the same motif. The gilded band below the rim — rubbed almost away on the original, and traceable today only as a faint film — was restored to the line at which the gold demonstrably begins. Nothing was invented.

The fourth product image shows the beaker itself, in the Cleveland Museum of Art, so the source is visible for what it is.

Marriage Beaker, Venice, late 1400s. Opaque glass (lattimo), enamelled. Overall 10.2 × 7.4 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1955.70. CC0 — public domain.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.