Desco da parto (birth tray)

In 15th-century Florence, one used to offer decorated trays to families after the birth of a child; this is why these objects were called desco da parto, literally birth plate. The relative good state of conservation of the present work shows that it was probably never used to carry objects, but was immediately considered as a priceless work of art. The scene represented on the front of the tray is precisely a delivery, which has just taken place on the room to the right side, while a cortege of women are processing from a cloister to make their greetings. Men are a bit aside, to the left, waiting to be admitted to the ladies’ world. The first ones are bearing a horn on which is attached a flag with a red lily, the symbol of Florence. Another man brings precisely a birth tray, perfect mise-en-abîme of the present object.
The front side of the desco represents a capital step in the evolution of Western art: this is the first preserved example of a use of mathematical perspective in painting. This technique had been invented in Florence around 1415 by the goldsmith, sculptor and architect-to-be Filippo Brunelleschi, in two panels which have not survived. The principle is simple: the lines parallel to the picture plane all converge in a unique point, which gives much more veracity to the representation of space. The first artist to understand the importance of this discovery was not a painter, but a sculptor: Donatello. (One of the first examples of this use was the latter’s Pazzi Madonna, now in the Bode Museum, fig. p. 318 above.) In the early 1420s, a young painter understood the significance of this discovery and made it his own: he was called Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, but everyone called him “the bad Thomas” – Masaccio. A few years after the desco, he would demonstrate his ability in a monumental scale, painting a niche in perfect perspective in a fresco representing the Trinity, still preserved in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella.
One may wonder why Masaccio decided to stage his scene into a cloister, a space of separation not only between men and women, but also between religious and lay persons: at that time, births happened in people’s houses, not in convents. This choice has to do with the new art of perspective: the alignment of columns was a perfect motive to insist on the painter’s skills in the matter. Their capitals are inspired from Antiquity, which had also begun to be a central reference for artists at the moment. At the end of that colonnade, beneath the extended flag, one can distinguish a part of a mantle and of a leg, showing that someone is hiding in the background (fig. below left): another proof of the virtuosity of Masaccio. A further astonishing detail is constituted by the woman entering the room where the birth has just happened: one can see the rear part of her body in the cloister space, while she is already congratulating the new mother on the other part of the wall; one person is represented, but it is as if she was seen in two different moments.
The reverse side of the birth tray (fig. above left) shows a naked boy playing with a dog; the quality of the picture is of far lesser quality than the other side of the panel, which had led scholars to attribute it to Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, named Lo Scheggia, the younger brother of Masaccio and less gifted painter. Neville Rowley | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019