Renaissance Egg, 1894
Renaissance Egg, 1894
The Imperial Fabergé egg presented by Tsar Alexander III to Tsarina Maria Feodorovna at Easter 1894
The Renaissance Egg is the Imperial Fabergé egg presented by Tsar Alexander III to his consort Tsarina Maria Feodorovna at Easter 1894. The last Easter egg the Tsar would present before his death later that year, the Renaissance Egg is one of the most elaborately decorated of the early Imperial series and exemplifies Peter Carl Fabergé's mastery of the eighteenth-century revival style that gave the egg its name. After passing through several twentieth-century collectors including Henry Walters and Malcolm Forbes, the egg was acquired by Viktor Vekselberg in 2004 as part of the Forbes Collection purchase and now resides in the Fabergé Museum in Saint Petersburg.
Form and decoration
The Renaissance Egg is constructed in the form of a horizontally oriented enamelled gold casket modelled in the Renaissance manner. The egg is approximately 13 centimetres long and rests on a low oval base. The body is enamelled in translucent white over a guilloché ground engraved in a trellis pattern, with rose-cut diamonds and rubies set into the surface as a decorative network. Bands of red enamel articulate the upper and lower zones; a sapphire is set into the upper face. The whole composition draws on the eighteenth-century Russian revival of Renaissance forms, which had returned to fashion at the imperial court in the 1880s and 1890s.
The surprise
The original surprise inside the Renaissance Egg has been the subject of historical and scholarly debate. Recent research by Fabergé specialists has proposed that the egg's intended surprise was the Resurrection Egg, a smaller egg-shaped pendant or sculpture carved with a Resurrection scene that has historically been catalogued separately and held by the Fabergé Museum collection. The proposal aligns the dimensions and decorative programme of the two pieces and is consistent with the Easter theme appropriate to a Tsar's gift. Earlier accounts had identified the surprise as a miniature replica of an eighteenth-century sedan chair; that identification has been revisited in recent scholarship. As with several of the Imperial eggs, the original surprise was separated from the egg in the post-Revolutionary dispersal of the Romanov collection and the question of correct attribution has been reopened by twenty-first century research.
Historical context
The Imperial Easter eggs were commissioned annually by Tsar Alexander III, beginning in 1885, and continued by his successor Nicholas II until 1916. Each egg was presented as an Easter gift to the dowager empress (after Alexander III's death) and to the consort empress, with the design and surprise determined by Fabergé in consultation with the imperial workshop. The Renaissance Egg is the tenth in the series and one of the more elaborate of the early eggs, reflecting both the imperial enthusiasm for the project and Fabergé's growing reputation. Alexander III died in November 1894, and the Renaissance Egg therefore stands as the final Easter gift of his reign.
Materials and workshop
The egg was made in the Fabergé workshops in Saint Petersburg under the direction of head workmaster Mikhail Perchin, whose mark appears on the piece. Perchin oversaw the production of most of the Imperial Easter eggs of the 1890s and is recognised as one of the most accomplished workmasters of the firm. The materials are gold, multiple colours of enamel, rose-cut diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls. The translucent white enamel over guilloché ground is a Fabergé signature technique requiring multiple firings at carefully controlled temperatures, and the translucency of the white enamel achieved on the Renaissance Egg is exceptional even within Fabergé's production.
Provenance
After 1917, the Renaissance Egg was inventoried by the Bolshevik authorities and held in the Sovnarkom and later Gokhran collections. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet government sold a number of Imperial Easter eggs through Western dealers — principally Armand Hammer and Alexander Schaffer — to Western collectors as part of the broader sale of Russian Imperial treasure to fund Soviet industrial development. The Renaissance Egg was sold in this period and acquired by Henry Walters of Baltimore, who held it until his death in 1931. The egg subsequently passed through several hands before being acquired by Malcolm Forbes for the Forbes Collection in the 1960s.
The Forbes Collection, the largest private collection of Imperial Easter eggs assembled in the twentieth century, was sold by the Forbes family in 2004 to the Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg, who returned the eggs to Russia and established the Fabergé Museum in the Shuvalov Palace in Saint Petersburg, where the Renaissance Egg has been displayed since the museum's opening in 2013.
In the trade and scholarship
The Imperial Fabergé eggs are not normally available on the commercial market. The fifty surviving Imperial eggs (of fifty-two known to have been made) are distributed across museums and a small number of private collections. The literature on the eggs is extensive, with major scholarly contributions from Géza von Habsburg, Marina Lopato, Tatiana Fabergé and others. Catalogues from major Fabergé exhibitions held at the Metropolitan Museum, the Walters Art Museum, the Hermitage, and the Fabergé Museum provide the principal scholarly reference for individual eggs including the Renaissance.