Heart-Shaped Flask in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2020

Heart-shaped flask
16th C, mounts ca. 1580


Object Details

Title: Heart-shaped flask

Date: 16th C, mounts ca. 1580

Culture: Gujarat (?), with Iberian mounts

Medium: Tortoiseshell from the hawksbill turtle (eremochlys imbricate), silver

Dimensions: 10 3/8 × 9 1/16 × 2 15/16 in. (26.3 × 23 × 7.5 cm)

Classifications: Metalwork, Natural Substances

Credit Line: Kunstkammer, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna


A 1596 inventory of Archduke Ferdinand II’s Kunstkammer lists this tortoiseshell flask as "an Indian flask . . . of cast glass or ceramic." The writer’s uncertainty about its material underscores the blurring of art and nature so prized in Kunstkammer objects. It also speaks to tortoiseshell’s rarity in Europe. Indian-made tortoiseshell pieces were brought back to Europe to be displayed as marvelous "exotica" as early as 1540.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/759694