Day 177 - Gondola prow

August 16, 2019

I'll confess that, aside from the studiolo, many of these galleries are completely unfamiliar to me, and today I visit a part of the Met I don't recall ever seeing before. Gallery 506 turns out to be, basically, a pass-through en route to other galleries. It also contains a few  items from 18th century Venice and functions as an anteroom to a bedchamber taken from the Sagredo  palace on the Grand Canal ("Ca' Sagredo," I hear an Italian man tell his companion authoritatively).  Over the door leading to the bedroom is the family's coat of arms surrounded by extravagantly Baroque "cresting" (ornamentation attached to a roof, cornice, or parapet, I learn) of gilded wood, topped by a rearing horse that reminds me of the ancient Greek horses at San Marco. 

Today's object is the prow of an 18th century gondola, perhaps 4 1/2 feer long, fashioned of partly gilded iron in the form of a doge's cap. It's elegantly slim and covered with finely incised decoration, mainly swirling vines and leaves but also the  coat of arms of the Delfini family and a small roundel with a portrait in profile, presumably of a Delfini male. To find out: Were the Delfini doges? The man is wearing a cap, though it doesn't look much like a doge's cap. The answer: They were one of twelve aristocratic families in Venice. They produced lots of prelates and naval men, but apparently only one doge, and that centuries earlier.  So much for my speculation that the gondola was used to transport a Delfini doge.