Perfume Burner Surmounted by a Satyr
Workshop of Desiderio da Firenze Italian
Not on view
This perfume burner and 1975.1.1396 are of exceptional size, complexity, and quality. Holes throughout the body of the piece as well as in the mouth and ears of the satyr would have allowed the scented smoke to escape from the interior. However, this particular object shows no signs of use, either suggesting that it served a purely decorative function or that the present bottom plate is a later replacement.
The fact that perfume burners of this model were inspired by Roman incense burners sometimes obscured their Renaissance origins. In 1719, the French antiquarian Bernard de Montfaucon illustrated this bronze in his influential book L'Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (Antiquity Explained and Represented in Figures). In the accompanying text, he identified it as a work from Roman antiquity and speculated that it might have been a cinerary urn.
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