On loan, the «flamingo dish» from the Museum's collection

Following in the wake of the Year of Cadafalch, the Masó Foundation of Girona recently opened the « Puig i Cadafalch, Masó i els Banys de Girona» (Puig i Cadafalch, Masó and the Girona Baths) exhibition which can bee seen until the end of March this year. We at the Museu del Disseny wanted to contribute something of our own, offering the so-called «flamingo dish».

It is an example of a medieval earthenware plate decorated in green and purple, commonly produced in the 13th and 14th centuries. The piece features the figure of a flamingo, with its long neck which is adapted to the shape of the dish and which has close decorative links with the Arab and Byzantine worlds.

The piece was found during the excavations carried out in the Arab Baths of Girona in the nineteen thirties, while it was being restored by Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Rafael Masó, two architects enthusiastic about the recovery of the Catalan historical heritage.

The importance of the piece is that we know its specific date of use, something unusual for this period. At the end of the thirteenth century, the attacks by the armies of the King of France destroyed the original building of the baths, meaning that almost the whole building required reconstruction, something which happened in 1294. It is from this period of reconstruction that our plate appears.