Cymbal bat bowl
A cymbal bat bowl is a specific group of decorated brass cymbals made in Nuremberg from the second half of the 15th to 16th centuries.
About terminology and history
The term cymbal bat bowl contains a doubling, since in the Middle Ages a bowl was called a cymbal. The name of striking is also a relic from the late Middle Ages. Back then, the first cymbal hunters still shaped the bowls with hammer blows on an anvil.
The usual reference to the early brass craft in Dinant only illuminates a production center near the copper mines and the deposits for calamine between the Meuse and the Rhine , which supplied the zinc content of the brass alloy. Basins from this period have not been preserved. After Dinant was destroyed in 1466, brass workers migrated to the surrounding area, including Aachen .
What exactly a cymbal racket made in the Middle Ages, which appears in archives or in northwestern German street names, is not documented. Basin bat bowls in the strict sense of this article did not appear until shortly before 1450. And they all come from the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg . If one understands by this decorated goods, because undecorated pieces cannot be assigned and their majority have been lost. Certainly, a guild-like sworn craft of the Beckschlager did not exist in Nuremberg until 1493. It made sure that production secrets were not allowed to leave the city. Up until the beginning of the 16th century, Nuremberg produced hundreds of thousands of cymbal bowls and supplied them to half of Europe. Thousands of them still exist today.
Technology, form and decor
Nuremberg obtained copper ore and calamine from long-distance trade. Brass burners melted brass bars from it. Annealed pieces of it were beaten into metal sheets and finally cut round. Unlike rolled sheet, they are thicker in the middle than at the edge. In this mass production, the shaping of the blanks was carried out by metal forming of an annealed round brass disc on a press bench . These were driven by transmission belts that obtained their kinetic energy from water wheels . Particularly large, heavy bowls were deepened with a hammer. Many cymbal bowls are in the shape of a plate, often 40-55 cm in size, or only 18 cm. A thin steel ring is usually crimped in its edge for stabilization. Bulbous bowls with a narrow rim measure mainly 22–26 cm. Rimless bowls made of thin sheet metal are very rare.
The unique selling point for Nuremberg is the decoration on steel matrices = dies. The decoration was cut into it in the negative and was transferred to the back of the blank by means of targeted hammer and chisel blows. The central motif, usually bordered by an annular bead, could be surrounded with text or ornamental wreaths. In addition to meaningful texts, there is purely ornamental calligraphy. Ornamental marks were struck from the front, mostly on the "flag" close to the edge.
The most common central motif is a "fish bubble rosette" made of spiral godrons. It can be found as early as 1463 in the cathedral of Siena by the halo of a statue of Peter. On some large plates, the rosette bulges like a gugelhupf. The most common figurative representation, the Annunciation, goes back to a painting from 1450. One of the Adam & Eve scenes is dated in the form, with 1487. The choice of motifs does not reveal any concept and often reflects, in keeping with the spirit of the times, religious content such as sacrificial symbolism or saints. The earliest bowls are 40 cm tall and not flat at the bottom; they have a navel-like hump in the middle (Umboschüsseln from umbilicus = belly button). Your motifs are arranged radially, e.g. B. Thistles. They alternate with sheet-like tongues, which were also molded from matrices, but contoured at the front. Graphic models of their motifs could not be determined and probably date from the time before 1450. Ornamental marks are still missing. Another early motif is the Gothic rose. Later transitional forms show a central motif, surrounded by Umbo bowl decor, and already have decorative marks. After 1500, the Gothic style was gradually replaced by the Renaissance.
The fact that the cymbal bat bowls of the 15th and 16th centuries were decorated exclusively from Nuremberg are argued by the fact that the contemporary job descriptions in the house books of the Twelve Brothers Foundation . The relationship between all bowls due to their motifs and decorative marks. The graphic motif models from Schedel's chronicle, from Albrecht Dürer and Nuremberg masters from his environment: Erhard Schön, Sebald and Bartel Beham, Georg Pencz. One of the last depictions that can be dated, Abraham's sacrifice, was made in 1534 as a woodcut by Hans Schäufelein .
Function and use
Many brass basins will have been used by wealthy citizens to wash their hands at the table. The trumpet-like base of a Gothic teapot fits on some Umbo bowls. Others were pompous dishes. They never hung on the wall because original hanging loops are rare. They stood on a shelf and, as contemporary paintings show, could serve as a reflector for a candle in front of it. Large bowls were used as baptismal font inserts and were thus preserved. As blood or bloodletting bowls, as some are called in southern Germany, decorated bowls would have been impractical, as coagulated blood sticks to the decor at the barber's. The designation as alms bowls, which gives it its name in many foreign languages, only indicates a sacred secondary use, as do owner and donation engravings. Inverted bowls were made for Catalan churches with the decor on their outside. They hung above head height as plate-shaped drip trays for eternal light oil lamps. In Spain, many Nuremberg bowls were reworked, as candle holders, bases for figures of saints, or even as braziers (brasero) with handles.
The few Flemish bowls with a wide rim and a freely driven baroque decor are easy to distinguish. The frequent Dutch “doopschotels” = christening bowls from the 17th to 19th centuries are also easy to recognize. They are plate-shaped, freely driven, their thin sheet metal is often cleaned up. Often a navette frieze sits on their flag. Ornamental marks are missing. They were also formed on the press bench, as were the largely unexplored North German bowls, which probably date from the 18th century. Its baroque decorations were also freely driven on a pitch pad and are therefore contours from the front.
About a third of the cymbal bowls offered in stores are imitations and fakes. Dutch bowls are also counterfeited.
See also
literature
- Hans Wentzel: Basin . In: Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, Vol. 2, 1938, Col. 151 ff.
- Hermann P. Lockner: Brass - A manual about brass equipment of the 15th-17th centuries Century , Munich 1982, pp. 30–86.
- Hermann P. Lockner: basin bat bowls. To 100 years of research; a proposed solution . In: Weltkunst , Vol. 66 (1996), Issue 22, pp. 2953-2957, ISSN 0043-261X .
- Tamás Egyeki-Szabó: cymbal bowls (15th - 16th centuries). Budapest 2008 (self-published).
- Klaus Tiedemann: Nuremberg cymbal bowls . In: Collector's Journal , 2011, Issue 11, 70–74, ISSN 0342-7684 .
- Klaus Tiedemann: Nürnberger Beckenschlägerschüsseln / Nuremberg Alms Dishes. Second, expanded edition. Dettelbach 2018, published by JH Röll.