The practice of decorating marriage contracts was revived in early seventeenth-century Amsterdam under the influence of Italian ketubah artists. In the late 1640s, the well-known Jewish engraver Shalom Italia created a copper engraving for ketubot of the Spanish-Portuguese community, which subsequently inspired an anonymous local artist to create a new modified version of this border, present in this Braginsky Collection ketubah of 1668. For more than two hundred years this border adorned Sephardic ketubot produced in Hamburg, Bayonne, London, New York and Curaçao.The calligraphic text commemorates the marriage of a known Sephardic physician, Daniel Tzemah Aboab. (red)

Online Since: 03/22/2017

This Esther scroll was created in Amsterdam around 1641 (on 7 sheets and 49 columns of text); it contains a printed decorative frame engraved by Shalom Italia (see his signature at the beginning of the scroll “Salom Italia sculp[sit]” (Shalom Italia engraved it). His frame designs influenced illustrated megillot throughout Europe. The printing plate, which is repeated several times over the entire length of the scroll, comprises four archways. On each pierced semicircular arch, above the architraves there are two women holding palm fronds. Landscape miniatures appear in the supraports and on the bases of the full-length figures representing Ahasuerus, Esther, Mordecai, and Haman. The scenes are based on contemporary landscape motifs, thus linking the Jewish text with the general visual culture of its time. (flu)

Online Since: 10/08/2020

Salom Italia (about 1619, Mantua – 1655, Amsterdam) divided the text into 30 columns (on four sheets) and placed them in the openings of massive rustica portals. In the niches between these portals, representations of King Ahasuerus and Queen Esther alternate. On the pedestals there are 29 pictures telling the story of the Book of Esther. Salom Italia's design of the Esther roles, of which a total of eleven works have survived, was of great influence. This megillah is one of three Esther scrolls decorated with pen drawings, which may have served as a model for the copper-engraved borders designed by the same artist. (flu)

Online Since: 12/10/2020