Seal 1750 - 1770

Curator: What a delightful miniature! This is a porcelain seal in the Rococo style, crafted sometime between 1750 and 1770. Editor: It’s precious, almost overwhelmingly so. I’m immediately struck by how small it must be, and how delicate the porcelain looks. There's something playful and very ornate about the object as a whole. Curator: It certainly is intricate. Imagine the skill involved in molding and painting something so tiny. Consider the molds they must have used, and the careful, skilled labor needed to fire such delicate ceramic without cracking. And how it was then affixed to that metal ring at the top... likely for wax sealing a letter. The consumer culture that made these available... Editor: Absolutely, but let’s also think about *what* that seal might have signified. We have the Cupid figure with a pierced heart. He acts almost as an endorser of correspondence saturated with love. What a loaded little object! Curator: You’re right, the symbolism is definitely there, especially that pierced heart motif. Yet it also becomes this commodified token produced through skilled but probably heavily managed labor, a trinket signifying wealth as much as true affection. Editor: It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how many truly heartfelt messages were sealed with this versus how many legal documents? The symbol is timeless, and perhaps that’s the real key to its enduring appeal. It speaks to the complexities within love and human bonds across the years. Curator: Indeed, and when we unpack the production –the high-end ceramic, the metal fixtures, all working towards an upper-class visual— we find this history frozen right in the artifact's materiality. Editor: Seeing art in objects like this—meant for daily use, originally—makes us consider how consistent symbolism and visual tropes connect us to our ancestors, revealing similar feelings over time. Curator: And, of course, reflecting social hierarchies as those feelings became concretized and expressed through particular things. Editor: Fascinating.