Christopher Columbus

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 1987

Sculptor: Salvador Furió

Size (cm): 49*57 

Limited Series

Porcelain Story

Of course, on Navigator's Day (namely, such a holiday appears today in all international calendars), God himself ordered me to tell in more detail about a dozen beautiful porcelain compositions collected in our collection, the hero of which is the legendary navigator Christopher Columbus. But of course, I will not talk about all the works. Moreover, some of them have already been presented in our “Figure of the Day” section.

I'm afraid to repeat myself, but the stories about the works from our collection are somehow connected with our trips around the world, so I have to remember some things several times. It so happened that at one time our travel routes were so often intertwined with the history of the life of Columbus and the discoveries made by him during his expeditions that we even began to think about some kind of non-random mystery of these coincidences. And if in the course of travels to various places in Spain, Portugal and Italy, the frequent mention of the name of Columbus was quite natural - here he was born, here he studied, here he received a blessing from the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, on an expedition to discover the western route to India , across the Atlantic Ocean - that adventure that happened to us in the same ocean and in a strange way connected with the fate of Columbus, can hardly be called an ordinary coincidence.

On a flight with the kids from Paris to the Dominican Republic, where we planned to visit the museum dedicated to the discovery of America by Columbus in Santo Domingo (and then, of course, visited there), our huge transcontinental airliner made an emergency landing right ... in the middle of the ocean! On the tiny island of Santa Maria, near which a few centuries ago Columbus' command ship called "Santa Maria" was wrecked! This happened after his discovery (as he thought) of a new route to India. In fact, the day when the famous navigator set foot on the land of one of the Bahamas - October 12, 1492 - is considered the day of the discovery of America.

So, if I haven’t managed to completely confuse you with my story about our disturbing landing in the middle of the ocean and about the crash of Columbus’s ship in the same place, then I’ll probably do it now. We would never visit Santa Maria Islet in our lives. But we ended up there (!) at a time when we passionately wanted to show the children the places in the Dominican Republic, where the great navigator and discoverer Christopher Columbus visited, by the way, on the way to new India (as he thought), he discovered both Cuba and the island of Haiti, on which the Dominican Republic itself is now located. And many other new lands for European sailors, forever now in world history associated with the name of Columbus ...

And I found this porcelain work quite by accident in the Portuguese city of Porto. And I was happy, because it was just the period of our passion for the fate of Columbus, who, by the way, died in poverty and oblivion in a small house on the outskirts of the Spanish city of Valladolid.