Tobacco Rasp with the Crucifixion and Last Judgement. French, 17th century.

Carved Fruitwood Tobacco Rasp with the Crucifixion and Last Judgement Imagery

French, late 17th century

Measurements
• Height: 18.5 cm
• Width: 7.5 cm
• Depth: 2 cm

A richly carved fruitwood tobacco rasp of elongated rectangular form, terminating in the head of a grotesque beast with bulging eyes, flared nostrils, and bared teeth. The front is worked in high relief with a vertical sequence of sacred imagery. At the top, amidst dense clouds, appears God the Father wearing a papal tiara, flanked by two angels and holding before His breast the dove of the Holy Spirit, wings outstretched before a radiant nimbus. This Trinitarian vision presides over the Crucifixion of Christ below, His bowed head and attenuated form conveying the moment of death.

Beneath the Cross, a cherub’s head with wings symbolises divine guardianship, set above a winged skull as a stark memento mori of human mortality. At the terminal, the snarling head of a fantastical beast confronts the viewer, perhaps to be read as a creature of Judgement, evoking the apocalyptic forces of sin and damnation conquered through the Passion. The composition is contained within a plaited border that runs around the perimeter.

The reverse is mounted with a steel grater plate, pierced with patterned rows of rasping studs for reducing blocks of pressed tobacco into fine powder. A hole pierces the beast’s mouth, allowing the grated tobacco to be tapped out, often for use as snuff. A triangular filled section is also present above the right ear of the beast, measuring 0.6 cm at its widest point and 2.5 cm in length, suggesting an early repair.

The iconography is carefully ordered, moving from the Heavenly Trinity above, through the central sacrifice of Christ, to the inevitability of death and final Judgement below. Such an arrangement encapsulates the Baroque preoccupation with salvation and mortality, dramatised here within an object of daily use. The juxtaposition of devotional imagery with the indulgence of tobacco is typical of the late 17th-century taste for moralising luxury objects, at once functional, didactic, and ornamental.