Jardinière - polygrom

Blackamoor Italian Venetian Fruit Bowl Vintage Planter
High quality, vintage piece in excellent condition. Gold bowl is beautiful as shown.

Here we have an art deco style decorative Venetian sculpted 'Blackamoor' fruit bowl.

Featuring a scalloped oval bowl on a pedestal carried by two polychrome figures.

'Blackamoor' is a European art style from the Early Modern period depicting highly stylized figures, usually African males but sometimes other non-European peoples, in exoticized form. 'Blackamoor' is often found in sculpture, jewelry, furniture, and decorative art.

These Blackamoors—a trope in Italian decorative art especially common in pieces of furniture, but also appearing in paintings, jewellery, and textiles. The motif emerged as an artistic response to the European encounter with the Moors—dark-skinned Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East who came to occupy various parts of Europe during the Middle Ages.

As figures in European decorative art, Moors were seldom portrayed as conquerors nor as the commercial & political leaders great parts of Mediaeval Europe - Remember Othello?

No, these Black men were commonly portrayed in positions of servitude—as footmen or waiters, for example—the figures personify fantasies of racial conquest.

Notwithstanding we can use the portrayal of these men to create a wider understanding of how the black body has been portrayed through the ages, and see how codes of race representation have been inherited, and how they affect our modern associations with the black body.

With this you will have a genuine piece of European history in your hands .