Rainbows in culture Rainbows in culture The rainbow, a natural phenomenon noted for its design and its place in the sky, has been a favorite component of art and religion throughout history. The rainbow has a place in legend owing to its beauty and the historical difficulty in explaining the phenomenon. In Greco-Roman mythology, the rainbow was considered to be a path made by a messenger (Iris) between Earth and Heaven. In Chinese mythology, the rainbow was a slit in the sky sealed by goddess Nüwa using stones of five different colours. The Irish leprechaun's secret hiding place for his pot of gold
Sèvres pot-pourri vase in the shape of a ship with no lid, the "cuvette à masques", produced from 1754 (earliest example, at Houghton Hall), and the shape of the "pot pourri à vaisseau" was also used in an adaptation as a lidded tureen with a stand, the "terrine gondole" from at least 1757 (two in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna), and a different "pot pourri gondole". The popularity of Sèvres porcelain with English collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is demonstrated by the presence of all ten known examples of this shape of vase in English collections by the mid-nineteenth century. Today there is one in France, five