Hanukkah Lamp

This lamp is made from the lost-wax process and therefore probably dates to the Renaissance. The crenellations across the top were derived from medieval architecture, seen, for example, in the fourteenth-century Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Their use on Hanukkah lamps goes back at least to the fifteenth century, when they were depicted on a lamp in an Italian Hebrew manuscript.
A similar backplate form, with its rectangular shape and crenellations above, is found on other Italian Hanukkah lamps with different imagery. One type is decorated with a scene of two centaurs carrying off nymphs, and represents a copy of a writing box plaque from Padua dated around 1500, to which the crenellations were added. This suggests that a few Italian backplates may have been cast from parts of secular objects, or else copied from them. However, it is not clear when these lamps were made, and as extant examples are poor castings, they may have been produced considerably after the Renaissance.