Dating the Venetian Rovere Flask at The Corning Museum of Glass and Other Flasks

This article focuses on four Venetian Renaissance pilgrim flasks decorated with coats of arms. A correct reading of heraldry on these vessels will help to date them more precisely. The first flask, in The Corning Museum of Glass, is decorated with the Rovere coat of arms. The authors propose a new date and a new dignitary as the owner of the piece, on the basis of the coat of arms and the enameled patterns, in response to a recent note in theJournal of Glass Studiesthat provided an incorrect identification of the owner and thus a wrong date. The second vessel, in London’s Wallace Collection, bears the Rappoltstein and Liechtenstein coats of arms, which are believed to reveal the recipient and the donor. The last two vessels, in the Musei Civici Medievale in Bologna, show the Sforza and Bentivoglio coats of arms, and they must be related to a marriage between the two families at the end of the 15th century.