Strikingly moulded multilobate snuff-box with silver mountings; it presents a white-paste body free from impurities and shiny lead-glazing.

The lid, which displays a cartouche enhanced by a gold fillet, bears a polychrome illustration of Dionysus among reveling Bacchants together with Silenus and the goat, executed with the technique of scenes depicted in low relief.

The body of the snuff-box is decorated with a continuous festoon of fruits, and, in the lower portion, with geometric tracery likewise bordered by a gold fillet. The decoration is clearly inspired by similar motifs in use at the Austrian Manufactory of Du Paquier. The interior, beneath the lid, shows a polychrome scene of boats and a river port. It is precisely this fluvial motif, together with the geometric pattern painted beneath the base of the snuff-box, that suggests an attribution of this piece to the hand of Karl Wendelin Anreiter: this type of landscape, widely used by the Meissen Manufactory and also by the Augsburg Hausmaler, derived from etchings produced in the first half of the XVIIth century that originated from the printing works of Amsterdam and Nurnberg.

Another snuff-box with a rather similar illustration (Chiarini M. - Cummings F.J. (ed.), 1974, p. 429, sheet 253 and also Ginori Lisci L, 1963, plate. XXIV) is legitimately attributed to Karl Wendelin Anreiter, since the scene depicted is virtually identical to that on a small cup signed by the painter from Bolzano and on display in Vienna at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Ginori Lisci L., 1963, plate II).

Furthermore, the very same scene was utilized by Karl Wendelin to decorate a porcelain teapot at Meissen (signed: "Karl W:Anreiter: vz. Winn") painted in Vienna around 1725 in "Schwarzlot" (among others, Schlosser I., in Apollo, February 1952, p. 39). If, by the above line of reasoning, the second above-mentioned snuff-box is genuinely attributable to Karl Wendelin Anreiter (see also d'Agliano A., 1996, pp. 12-13, f. 5, for a small cup with similar decoration), then it appears warranted to infer that the pictorial decoration of the Dionysiac revels, in low relief, is almost certainly also by the hand of the Bolzano artist. (A.B.)