 |
| 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.