Desco da parto (Birth Salver), obverse: Diana and Actaeon, reverse: Justice

Lorenzo di Niccolò, a Florentine painter active in the late fourteenth century and a follower of Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, created this desco da parto (birth salver) around 1380. These decorated trays were given to new mothers among the Florentine elite, and their mythological and allegorical subjects—here Diana and Actaeon on the obverse and Justice on the reverse—reflected the humanist culture emerging alongside Gothic religious art. Now at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, it is a rare surviving example of secular Gothic painting.

Painted in egg tempera on a round wooden panel, this birth salver employs the narrative clarity and decorative richness of late Gothic Florentine painting. The obverse scene of Diana and Actaeon is composed within the circular format with figures arranged in a continuous landscape, while the reverse presents a single allegorical figure against a patterned ground.