Temperance dish (basin), with personifications of the four elements and allegories of the seven liberal arts

Carl Haas, Galvanoplastisches Atelier des k. k. österreichischen Museums, Vienna, Austria, ca. 1889

Silver-plated copper electrotype copy. The allegory of Temperance in the centre is surrounded by a band containing personifications of the four elements (Ignis, Aer, Aqua, Terra); lining rim in medallions are the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts (Minerva) and allegories of the seven liberal arts (Grammatica, Dialectica, Rhetorica, Musica, Arithmetica, Geometria, Astronomia).

Diameter: 43.5 cm

UMP 5110

Purchased at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris.

A copy based on the famed Renaissance pewter relief dish executed in around 1585 by French metal engraver and medallist François Briot, Montbéliard. Museum director Josef Škorpil acquired it for the museum collections at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris as it was a prime example of Late Renaissance-era pewtermaking. 

Electrotyping (or galvanoplasty), an electrolytic copper precipitation process based on the interaction of direct current on an aqueous solution of copper sulphate (blue vitriol), was discovered by German physicist Moritz von Jacobi in 1838.

Carl Haas’s galvanoplasty studio at the Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna was a leading company creating electrotype copies of historical objects dating from antiquity to the Renaissance and Baroque age. By 1890, the company catalogue contained more than 570 items.

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