An engraved Romanesque dish
Gilded copper bowl engraved with concentric bands of ornament. With a short crack to the base, an older repair to the rim. H 6.6, D 26.1 cm. weight 257 g.
12th C.
Josepha Weitzmann-Fiedler lists numerous comparable examples in international museum collections, some better, others worse or only fragmentarily preserved. The majority are archaeolofical finds and originate from Aargau, Pomerania, Strasbourg, London, Finland - in short, they were distributed all throughout Northern Europe. Weitzmann-Fiedler calls this group "ornamental bowls" in order to distinguish them from the motif bowls, the annus bowls, the virtue and vice bowls, the mythological and knight bowls. The size and weight of the ornamental bowls vary little, but the engraved decorations alwas differ.
Provenance
Private collection, Bern; aquired in the 1980s from Bader.
Literature
Most comparable to an example listed in Weitzmann-Fiedler under cat. no. 165 (Romanische gravierte Bronzeschalen, Berlin 1981, p. 127 ff.)
Cf. also Müller, Gravierte romanische Bronzeschalen und Schachfiguren des 11./12. Jahrhunderts, in: Archäologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 9/1998, p. 39 ff.
Cf. also Mende, Die mittelalterlichen Bronzen im Germanischen Nationalmuseum. Bestandskatalog, Nuremberg 2013, no. 100.