Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Furniture and Objects ornamented with Pietra Dura

Pietra Dura Table Top
Florence
17th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Prado

Pietra Dura Table Top
Florence
17th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Prado

Pietra Dura Table Top
Florence
17th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Prado

Pietra Dura Table Top
Florence
17th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Prado

"Perhaps the sumptuous taste of the period found its most adequate expression in the elaborate furniture produced by the renowned Florentine inlay industry known as pietra dura or pietra commessa. ... As no princely house in the fifteenth century was complete without a cassone enriched with pastigilia and painted decorations by Dello Delli or Andrea di Cosimo, so in the early seventeenth century the pretentious Italian houses, as well as those of the rest of Europe, must include among their sumptuous furnishings a cabinet, or at least a table, by the Pietra Dura Manufactory. These cabinets like those of the previous epoch were generally ebony or a dark-toned wood, and in design were most complicated, imitating elaborate architectural designs." 

 from A History of Italian Furniture by William Macdougal Odom (New York : Doubleday, Page, 1919)

Pietra Dura Table Top
Florence
17th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Victoria & Albert Museum

Pietra Dura Table Top (detail)
Florence
17th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Victoria & Albert Museum

Pietra Dura Table Top
Rome
late 16th-early 17th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pietra Dura Table Top
Rome
ca. 1580
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Victoria & Albert Museum

Pietra Dura Cabinet on Giltwood Stand
South Germany
17th century
hard-stone mosaic-work and ivory veneer
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Pietra Dura Table Top
Russia
19th century
hard-stone mosaic-work
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Pietra Dura Table Top (detail)
Russia
19th century
hard-stone mosaic-work
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Pietra Dura Table Top (deatil)
Russia
19th century
hard-stone-mosaic-work
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Pietra Dura Cabinet
Rome
18th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Pietra Dura Cabinet
(The John Evelyn Cabinet)
Florence
17th century
hard-stone and marble mosaic-work
 Victoria & Albert Museum

John Evelyn (1620-1706) spent the middle 1640s traveling in Italy (and avoiding the English Civil War). Documents survive to show that in Florence he placed an order for the cabinet pictured immediately above, later shipped home to him in London. As an aesthetic object, it is interesting as an example of a non-royal commission executed with restraint rather than the conspicuous lavishness displayed on most of the other examples grouped here. As an object of literary significance, this relatively modest cabinet lives in a perpetual halo of glory.  In 1813  more than a century after Evelyn's death  the forgotten manuscripts of his copious and now-famous Diaries were discovered in this cabinet.