Onyx And Gilt-bronze Patera Or Dish, Renaissance Style

Onyx, gilt bronze
Vienna
Late nineteenth century
Diam. 22 cm (8.7 in.)

A Jugendstil patera recently came up for sale in Milan. Cut from the same stone, it has a silver mount set with four cabochons in the same colours—mauve, green, blue and red—and bears the label of Franz Hiess & Söhne, a now-forgotten house of fin-de-siècle Vienna, once renowned for trading in and making a great number of luxury objects, often domestic in use and almost always in precious materials. Koloman Moser, for one, designed for the firm, ca. 1900, a writing box veneered in wood and mounted with mother-of-pearl and silver. As the firm itself cast bronze, there is every reason to think that the mount decorating the rim of the present patera was indeed made in Vienna at the same period as that of the Milan example, though in a different style, Renaissance, and a different material, gilt bronze.

Literature
See Harold Berman, Bronze Sculptors and Founders. 1800-1930, vol. II, Chicago, 1976 and Dan Klein, Decorative art. 1880-1980, Oxford, 1986.