Brass dish

Description

The oldest brass dishes are without ornament. Only when they were used as baptism or collection plates in church or to embellish citizens' rooms in the C15 did they begin to be decorated, usually with religious imagery. The craft reached its peak at the end of the Middle Ages; the second half of the C16 brought its decline. On the dish shown Samson and the Lion is the principal motif. Samson's fight with the lion was understood in medieval theology as prefiguring Christ's Passion. The image was made by hammering into a negative form from the back. Only the scale decoration at the base of the rim is embossed without the use of a pattern; it serves to reinforce the dish where the metal is thinnest. The ornamental wreaths around the bottom and the rim were impressed with two different punches from the upper side. It is thought that the men who carried out this work were merely artisans, as they would hardly themselves have made the brass sheet, the punches and the negative forms. The relatively small number of motifs on surviving brass dishes indicates that the craftsmen worked with only a few negative forms for centuries.