Antique Miniature Italian Alabaster Pedestal Bowl With Grapes and Dolphins

On offer is a classic Grand Tour-style Italian carved alabaster miniature “tazza,” a compote bowl, traditionally crafted in workshops around Florence or Volterra, Italy. During the 19th and mid-20th centuries, Italian lapidaries created scaled-down replicas of monumental Greco-Roman marble vases for wealthy European and American tourists.
The top rim is heavily carved with an overlapping motif of grape clusters and grapevines. This imagery draws directly from classical Roman mythology, representing Bacchus, the god of wine, ritual madness, and ecstasy. This was a highly popular motif for period dining table ornaments.
The pedestal features intertwined classical dolphins forming a spiral stem. In Roman and Neoclassical art, these are not modern bottlenose dolphins, but rather they are stylized, scaled sea creatures with wide mouths and upturned tails, symbolizing safe travels, luck, and Neptune’s ocean kingdom.
The piece combines two variations of alabaster. The bowl uses a highly figured, dramatically veined grey and white marbled alabaster, while the delicate pedestal base is carved from a highly translucent, creamy white-to-honey colored translucent alabaster.
The bottom shows a hollowed-out, circular lathe mark typical of antique Italian stone turning. The dark speckling is typical aging, grime, and ancient dust caught in the soft, porous surface of the stone over decades of sitting on tabletops.
At 6.5 inches high and 6 inches in diameter, this is an intimate, cabinet-sized centerpiece or “vide-poche,” a small tray for keys/trinkets, just the place to drop those keys to the Maserati.
Signature/Maker’s mark: Nonexistent.
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