Birthing Tray - Water

In the Italian Renaissance, birthing trays were not merely used to carry foodstuffs to pregnant woman or new mothers but were also used as objects as contemplation. They were thought to have magical properties which would protect woman from the pain of childbirth or could prevent woman from giving birth to deformed children. 

Instead of the idyllic scenes usually depicted on these trays, in many of The Birthing Tray series, a violent caesarean birth is depicted and the gender roles depicted by the ‘confined’ woman in her bedchamber and the explorer are intertwined in scenes that undermine expected gender conventions.

‘This alternative reading of the dynamic between interior and exterior, I would suggest, has particular pertinence to Birthing Tray – Water. While Bernardino Pintoricchio’s fresco of The Birth of John the Baptist (c. 1506) in the Baptistery of the Siena Cathedral provided the source for the reclining mother, the midwife and the woman bathing the newborn child (here framed by a jug of water in the manner of a roundel), the work also includes a figure described by Dixie as a ‘strange kind of wild woman’ that she based on an image from a medieval bestiary. ‘(Extract from Figuring Maternity: Christine Dixie’s Parturient Prospects by Prof. Brenda Schmahmann, Dearte n75_a4)