Artist Unknown

Exhibited by Kunstkammer Georg Laue

Material Leather, copper, fire-gilt and engraved

Dimensions 10 x 18 cm

Place of Creation South German

Status Vetted

About the Work

What at first sight looks like a Gothic shoe with a bell tied to the exaggeratedly pointed tip is actually a drinking vessel made for drinking toasts to welcome a guest. The numerals 1567, engraved on the rim of the copper mount indicate when this extremely unusual vessel was made. This is one of the very few Renaissance shoe cups hitherto known from the sixteenth century. Sixteenth-century drinking vessels in the form of pointed shoes are, in fact, extremely rare. Hence a brief look at the few similar cups in this form is called for. They are held by the Bally Schuhmuseum in Schönenwerd, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich, the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Rudolf August Oetker Art Collection in Bielefeld.

Cups in the form of pointed shoes are known to have been used as drinking vessels in shoemakers’ guilds on ceremonial occasions. But they were also used as wedding cups. In fact, shoes have been symbolically associated with wooing and nuptials since time immemorial. The custom of giving shoes as wedding presents is recorded as long ago as the sixth century AD. At that time the shoe was regarded – as the ring still is – as the sign of legally binding marriage. The custom of drinking from a bridal shoe is also recorded.

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Provenance

Ferdinand Edouard, Baron von Stumm (1843–1925)

Literature

Paul Weber: Schuhe. Drei Jahrtausende in Bildern, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 44–45
Alice Zrebiec: With Bells on His Toes, in: Metropolitan Museum Journal 84 (1989), pp. 167–171
Timothy Schroder: The Francis F. Fowler, Jr. Collection of Silver, Los Angeles 1991, p. 79, p. 85, Cat. Nos. 91–92
Monika Bachtler / Dirk Syndram / Ulrike Weinhold (eds.): Die Faszination des Sammelns. Meisterwerke der Goldschmiedekunst aus der Sammlung Rudolf-August Oetker, exhib. cat. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Bayerisches Nationalmuseum Munich, Munich 2011, pp. 50–51, Cat. No. 5