Categories
Museum Object

22. Nef

Gallery:

Clocks

Room / Case / #

39 / 5 /

Dinner is served

Dinner is Served: A nef is an extravagant and expensive table ornament , normally of silver or gold gilt metal, but sometimes glass, in the shape of a medieval sailing ship. The name derives from the french for a type of three or four masted sailing ship called a carrack. Often the Nef would have a function of holding spices or salt and would be placed in front of your most honoured guest as their personal salt seller. This particular Nef has a different function.

Merchants involved with long distance trade, such as with The Levant Company or with The East India Company got hugely rich and the ships that made this trade profitable attracted admiration. This Automata, made in Augsburg,  was used to announce a banquet by travelling independently along a table. As it went, a small pipe organ  plays a tune and drumsticks play on a skin stretched across the base of the ship’s hull.

The tops of the fore and mizzen masts would twirl round and the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, preceded by three heralds, would process and make a small bow before the Emperor, Rudolf II, seated on a throne beneath a canopy. For a grand finale, the ship fired the main cannon in the bowsprit, which then ignited a fuse that quickly caused the firing of all the other cannons. Dinner was then served.

You are not still using just a dinner bell, are you?