Offered by Antiquités Philippe Glédel
18th Furniture, country french furniture
Very rare chest of drawers or cassettone "à bambocci" in solid walnut very richly carved.
Provenance : Genoa, Liguria, Italy.
Period : second half of the 16th century.
At the end of the Renaissance, the capital of Liguria, "Genoa the Superb", as Petrarch called it, was a cosmopolitan port city open to the world (a large Flemish colony lived there) which dominated the Mediterranean and took control of the East. In Italy, the 16th century is referred to as the century of the Genoese. In the service of Charles V, the famous Andrea Doria laid the foundations of an aristocratic republic.
During the second half of the century, the cupboard and the cabinet replaced the chest in the interiors of large residences, and so around 1560, in Genoa, the first "bambocci" furniture with sculpted decorations inspired by Mannerism then in vogue in Italy appeared, as well as a new piece of furniture, intended to lock up the household linen and which would definitively replace the chest, and which was adorned with similar decorative elements: the chest of drawers, a piece of furniture that will make its first appearance in Italy about 150 years before the first French creations of André-Charles Boulle. These very first Italian Renaissance chests of drawers were very successful and became a school in the neighboring provinces of Lombardy and Tuscany, and were manufactured throughout the 17th century and even during the first half of the 18th century in an Italy still attached to the Baroque.
The chest of drawers that we present is a very rare model, because it belongs to the first period of manufacture, it enters the very restricted circle of the Renaissance models, among specimens that appear very rarely on the market. It is also of a particular architectural formula by its arrangement of four superimposed atlatls. Its imposing size designates it as a palace chest of drawers but also as one of the earliest creations (it is clear that the dimensions were not yet clearly fixed), and finally its very classical decoration inspired by antiquity belongs perfectly to the Renaissance repertoire.
The construction of its frame also induces a High Period manufacturing: monoxyle top of 134 x 71 cm, sides of a single wide board (the moldings are added) of 108 x 63 cm.
The chest of drawers, both highly architectural and admirably fancy, opens with six drawers on four rows. One can particularly observe the rare arrangement of the uprights punctuated by four superimposed atlantes, the central drawer very richly sculpted with putti bearing a family coat of arms, the handles in the round decorated with anthropomorphic figures all differentiated (male on the right side - female on the left), the thin bands of rosaries with olives in elegy then the broad bands carved with friezes of glyphs framing the drawers, the thin intermediate crosspieces carved with a large frame of a frieze of rosaries and finally the perimeter of the tray and the cornice of the base carved with a frieze of half-flowers. The sides of the furniture are also hemmed with carved bands. Finally, it should be noted that on all these prominent parts in particular, the patina, as one can guess, is formidable in its depth and luster.
This piece of furniture has come down to us in a rather exceptional original condition, with all the repairs, apart from very slight wear and tear and scattered marks of experience, which are quite normal for a piece of furniture over 400 years old, being the majority of the rear ball feet. The front ball feet are the original ones, and the furniture still has all its original locks and even a period key.
It has benefited from a restoration followed by a thorough filling and polishing that gave it back all its shine.
