Cups and drinking bowls are among the rarest objects produced in Gujarat from mother-of-pearl - some being made for export following European shapes. This unique drinking cup, made from the shell of the green turban sea snail (Turbo marmoratus) and featuring a whole shell as the bowl, is raised on a trumpet-shaped pedestal foot. While the twelve-sided foot and the six-sided annular knot (decorated with incised filets all around) are made from green turban shell sections pinned with brass pins, the upper part of the stem features tesserae from pearl oysters of the genus Pinctada. It is fitted with simple silver mountings on the rim of the foot and on the attachment with the bowl. Highly valued for their lustre and colourful iridescence, green turban seashells were part of late Renaissance princely collections and regarded as natural wonders or exotica naturalia, with many sometimes mounted with precious metals as display objects of artistic ingenuity, valued as exotica artificialia in royal and aristocratic Kunstkammern. Early examples include a ewer, made by Wenzel Jamnitzer around 1570 from two seashells, in the Schatzkammer of the Residenz, Munich (inv. no. 567), and another, also made in Nuremberg, from three seashells by Nicolaus Schmidt around 1582-1589, in the Dresden Grünes Gewölbe (inv. no. IV 157).
While several turban shells set with late sixteenth or early seventeenth century European mounts are extant, few Gujarati drinking seashells such as the present example are known. Two examples, one fitted with a cover, possibly used as a spice container or as a saltcellar, belong to the Royal Danish Kunstkammer, now part of the National Museum, Copenhagen (inv. no. EBc69 and EBc70). These, matching in size (both 17 cm in height) and construction (and even material, as they also feature Pinctada tesserae on the stem) to our present cup, are recorded in the royal inventories since 1725.The 1775 inventory, more descriptive, records: “Two Cochleæ lunares [in Latin, “moon-like sea snails”] or rather large, nacreous conches with the outer shell removed. They are shaped like drinking vessels; one of them has a lid, the other none, and has a broken foot”. A third example, recently published, is in the Armoury of the Moscow Kremlin Museums, inv. no. ДК-1202.
