Salt

1575/1600

Netherlands

An allegorical female nude in a landscape appears on each of the four sides of this work, while a frieze of putti and fantastic sea creatures runs around the base. Such imagery was intended to evoke the interaction between sea and land that produces salt. This elaborately decorated salt holder would have graced the tables at lavish banquets during the Renaissance and, at the same time, served a useful function. Indeed, this work is a proper tribute to the precious commodity of salt, which served to make perishable food more palatable and was also a sign of great wealth.

On View: Applied Arts of Europe, Gallery 238

Title: Salt
Origin: Netherlands
Date: 1575–1600
Medium: Silver gilt
Dimensions: 10.3 × 21.4 × 21.4 cm (4 1/16 × 8 7/16 × 8 7/16 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Mrs. Stanley Keith
Reference Number: 1944.781

Berlin, Ausstellung von Kunstwerken des Mittelalters und der Renaissance aus Berliner Privatbesitz veranstaltet von der Kunstgeschichtlichen Gesellschaft, 20 May – 3 July 1898.
Worcester Art Museum, The Virtuoso Craftsman: Northern European Design in the Sixteenth Century, 27 March – 25 May 1969, cat. 67.
Art Institute of Chicago, The Artist Looks at the Landscape, 22 June – 25 August 1974.
San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, The Triumph of Humanism, 22 October 1977 – 8 January 1978, cat. 80.
Art Institute of Chicago, Renaissance Decorative Arts from Chicago Collections, 2 March – 14 June 1987, cat. 35.

Georg Reichenheim, Berlin, by 1898 [lent to Berlin 1898]; died 1903; his widow Margarete Reichenheim, née Eisner, who married Franz Oppenheim in 1907; she died 1935, Berlin; sale of the collection of Margarete Oppenheim, Julius Böhler, Munich, 22 May 1936, no. 182. William Randolph Hearst, New York and San Simeon, by 1944 [Brummer index card N6052 in the Cloisters Library and Archives, New York]; sold to Joseph Brummer, New York, 14 December 1944 [see source cited above]; sold by Joseph Brummer, New York, to the Art Institute, 1944, for $1,600.

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