A Comtat Venaissin ironwork console, early 18th century.

Console from the papal enclave in Avignon, with a slightly curved and curved rectangular shape. Here, there is no cabinet making but locksmithing, everything is white-hot metal, the iron is beaten and forced hot in powerful wooden moulds, the sheet metal is pushed onto sculpted dies then chiselled and finally gilded. The two materials are joined together by screws, rivets, wedges and eyelets. The straight, slightly curved belt, which is as fine as it is opulent, rests on a four-legged base with a double tapering trend of involuted doglegs. The front legs, as elegant as they are nervous, are joined by a bridge brace decorated with foliage and centred on an acanthus leaf. The entire base is set into a multi-lobed marble slab. Everything is a harmonious assembly of fine volutes, graceful scrolls and other rinceaux as lively as they are sharp, without forgetting growing pearls, shells, palmettes, acanthus leaves and other foliage in the natural state, all assembled thanks to crushed eyelets. Here everything is beaten flat and forced onto the anvil once it has come out of the master locksmith's oven. The whole thing is topped with a sheet of marble in turquoise breccia with a stave running around the edge. This work, so specific to the master locksmiths of the Venaissins, gives this atypical console all its letters of nobility; we find the exuberance of the South combined with the theatrical taste of a very Italian magnificence. It should be noted that the marble of the top, although 18th century, has been brought back.
The inventories of the abbot G Arnaud D' Agnel in his work; The furniture of furnishing Provençal and Comtadin, volume one, third part plates CXXVII and CXXVIII learn us that some mansions Aix, Marseilles or Avignonnais had such parts, the Davignon castle in Camargue with share example preserved its console since the 18 th century
Marble dimensions, width 128cm, depth 66.8cm and height 92.6cm


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