Seventeenth-century Portuguese faience deep armorial plate, of broad raised lip, resting on a low setback foot rim and decorated in cobalt-blue pigment applied onto a white-tin enamel ground.
The central section features exuberant armorial composition, attributable to the Mascarenhas and Costa families, within quartered “classic” Portuguese shield, inserted into a Mannerist cartouche and surmounted by unspecified coronet. The heraldic composition is framed by Baroque decorative border band of stylised, finely outlined, cobalt-blue acanthus leaves.
The broad lip, segmented into eight sections that extend into the concave centre, alternates ovals with camellias wrapped in ribbons and bound by blue spirals at the corners, with branches of peaches, interspersed with two types of vertical decorative elements, one characterized by flower centred suspending bows, the other by rows of flowers (pearls or jewels) and Chinese pierced coins.
On the reverse lip, eight polygonal cartouches centred by stylized floral motifs alternating with straight vertical lines.
In this instance we are faced with a Portuguese heraldic piece, harmoniously and ingeniously interpreted by the Lisbon potter on the basis of a Chinese Kraak porcelain prototype, a characteristic that was common in Portuguese faience decorative elements during this chrono stylistic period. This spatial organisation solution, evident on the plate’s lip ornamentation, framing a central, European inspired motif, will be long lasting within the context of Lisbon’s ceramic manufactures, extending well into the 1650s, albeit in increasingly stylized solutions, a fact that resulted directly from the pressures of an ever-growing production[1].
Beyond the high quality of the Portuguese faience, at the time even referred to as porcelain given its “counterfeit” similarities with China produced ceramics, the opulent heraldic depiction on this plate’s surface was clearly a visual and symbolic display of the power and wealth of its orderer. Both the Mascarenhas and the Costa families are ancestrally renowned in Portugal, and, in fact, a mention to a marriage between a Maria da Costa and her cousin João Mascarenhas does indeed exist in the archival record[2].
This type of plates was destined exclusively to the wealthiest of homes, being specifically classified as decorative display pieces of very limited practical use.

[1] A Coleção de Faiança do Museu de Artes Decorativas de Viana do Castelo, Viana do Castelo, C. M. V. C., 2015, p. 16.
[2] Cf.: Margarida Maria de Carvalho Ortigão Ramos Paes Leme, Costas com Dom: Família e Arquivo (Séculos XV-XVII, Doctoral Art History Dissertation on the subject of Historic Archivist Specialisation, presented to Lisbon New University, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2018, p. 143.