Desco da parto

A painted desco da parto (a birth tray or birth salver) was an important symbolic gift on the occasion of a successful birth in late medieval and Early Modern Florence and Siena. The surviving painted deschi represented in museum collections were commissioned by elite families, but inventories show that birth trays and other special birth objects like embroidered pillows were kept long after the successful birth in families of all classes: when Lorenzo de' Medici died, the inventory shows that the desco da parto given by his father to his mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, at her lying-in, was hanging in his private quarters to the day of his death.

A desco da parto need not be specially commissioned; they were produced in workshops in series for stock, often being personalised with a coat-of-arms when they were bought. There was a distinctive repertoire of iconography for the trays, the recto (top) sides sharing much with that for the painted cassone chests often used as gifts at marriage, but also with verso sides often showing scenes of mothers after childbirth or pin-up figures of boy toddlers, accompanied by the coats of arms of both parents. After being used as a tray in the post partum period they could be hung on a wall as a painting.

Infant mortality was highest during the crucial first days, when the mother might also succumb to childbed fever. A successful childbirth was lavishly celebrated. Sons would one day assert the family interests, whether in modest workshop or banking house; daughters would share the household's work until they were married and would cement the exogamous ties that stabilized Tuscan family position at every social level. Painted childbirth trays began to appear about 1370, in the generation following the Black Death, when the tenuousness of life was more vivid than ever. In the fifteenth century, D.C. Ahl found, at least one appears in almost half of all inventories she surveyed.

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