Minneapolis Institute of Art

Jug (plutzer) with the Adoration of the Magi

Workshop of Paul Preuning

Date

c. 1545–55

Medium

Earthenware with colored lead- and tin-glazes, and applied molded decoration

Department

European Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Black Africans were a common sight in the cosmopolitan centres of European Renaissance life, such as Nuremberg where this jug was made. Artists were inspired to incorporate such figures into paintings, particularly as Balthazar, the king or magus who journeyed to the stable where Christ was born, bringing the gift of myrrh. Here the ceramicist Paul Preuning has applied a mould of Balthazar onto the body of a jug, and used colored glazes to depict him as a Black African. In a different use of the same mould in the collection of another museum, however, Preuning glazed the figure to appear as white. The representation of religious content in the decorative arts was controversial, and in 1548, Preuning's jugs depicting Christ flanked by secular imagery were destroyed on orders of the Council of Nuremberg. Germany

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