page_title: Desco da parto
section_title: Artists and history
hierarchical_section_title: Desco da parto / Artists and history
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: desco da parto con diana e atteone e, sul retro, la giustizia English: Obverse of birth salver,Diana and Actaeon
context_page_description: A painted desco da parto was an important symbolic gift on the occasion of a successful birth in late medieval and Early Modern Florence and Siena. The surviving painted deschi represented in museum collections were commissioned by elite families, but inventories show that birth trays and other special birth objects like embroidered pillows were kept long after the successful birth in families of all classes: when Lorenzo de' Medici died, the inventory shows that the desco da parto given by his father to his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, at her lying-in, was hanging in his private quarters to the day of his death.
  A desco da parto need not have been specially commissioned; they were produced in workshops in series for stock, often being personalised with a coat-of-arms when they were bought. There was a distinctive repertoire of iconography for the trays, the recto sides sharing much with that for the painted cassone chests often used as gifts at marriage, but also with verso sides often showing scenes of mothers after childbirth or pin-up figures of boy toddlers, accompanied by the coats of arms of both parents.
context_section_description: Workshops that produced deschi da parto were often also manuscript illuminators, as for example Bartolomeo di Fruosino, an illuminator who also produced panel paintings, and painters of the panels that were incorporated into the fronts and ends of quattrocento cassoni. Such a workshop was that of the "Master of the Adimari cassone", now usually identified as Masaccio's brother Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi (or "Lo Scheggia", "the Splinter"), which also produced the desco da parto showing youths playing at civettino in an urban setting, in Palazzo Davanzati, Florence, and other examples.  A divided verso showing two naked boys fighting realized $482,500 at auction in 2012.
  Some artists remain unidentified, and were clearly not of the first rank, but, given the significant names represented among the tiny proportion of survivors, it appears that many artists took an occasional break from larger projects to produce desci.  The circular tondo shape in normal panel paintings, which became fashionable in the mid-fifteenth century in Florence, may have developed from the smaller desci.
  The format of the desco, usually about 50 to 60 cm across, is with twelve or sixteen sides, or from about 1430, round, enclosed within a slightly raised lip integral to the panel.  Some examples that are now round seem to have originally been twelve-sided.  Some have dates that record the day of the birth (or marriage) concerned. Only about two dozen desci survive, some now with the surfaces sawn apart by dealers in modern times, to create two works. In inventories they are often described as "broken" or "old", and most apparently were used as trays until too scruffy to keep.  As the 15th century continued they were gradually replaced as gifts by pieces of majolica, often special "birthing sets" with similar iconography, although the Uffizi has an example of 1524 by Jacopo Pontormo, and others are even later. Examples from the 16th-century tend to have a more raised bowl-like profile, as in the Pontormo, as if echoing the new maiolica shapes.  Production of painted cassoni ceased over the same decades.
  Jacqueline Marie Musacchio rejects the common assumption that these trays were made to celebrate a marriage; she never encountered a desco da nozze in any 15th-century inventory.  But a Sienese wedding casket (cofanetto nuziale) in wood in the Louvre has a round top with a Triumph of Venus by Giovanni di Paolo (dated 1421) that is effectively identical to the desci form.  Nevertheless, if they were presented at the time of the marriage, though certainly regarded as associated specifically with pregnancy and childbirth, this would both explain how such elaborate objects were available for use very soon after an uncertain event, and mean that the beneficial images of boys could exert their positive influence throughout the important first pregnancy.
caption: The story of Diana and Actaeon. San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum
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