Tabletop with marble inlay and semiprecious stone commesso

Roman manufacture

This table, set on a Neoclassical wooden structure, has a highly refined commesso top, with a large oval in the middle in Asian alabaster, inserted in a panel in nero antico marble decorated with flowers and foliate volutes in lapis lazuli, agate, onyx and jasper, all surrounded by a border embellished with precious marble inlay. The piece, which would have been made in a specialised Roman workshop, was first documented in the Borghese Collection in the seventeenth century.

Object details

Commentary

‘Opposite the statue of the Gladiator, there is a table with a top in nero antico marble, eight and a half palmi long and five wide, all commesso in valuable stones, such as lapis lazuli, jasper, mother of pearl and similar, with an oval in the middle in Asian alabaster, of a reddish hue, and a black marble frame’ (Manilli 1650, p. 81). In his description of the Casino Borghese, Giacomo Manilli took care to include this singular tabletop in marble and semiprecious stone, which Domenico Montelatici also described half a century later (1700, pp. 219–220). Both reported that it was used at the time as a support for the ‘Play of sixteen young boys, goading and pulling a ram by the horns’, which is the Bacchanale of Putti on a lapis lazuli background by Giovanni Campi (inv. CCLXXVI), and the two statues of Hunters in black jasper, made between 1651 and 1653 by the same sculptor (invv. CCLXXIV-CCLXXV).

Documented in the inventory of 1765 in the same room, it was also listed in the fideicommissary inventory of 1833 and the bill of sale for the furnishings in the Casino Pinciano in 1904, when the Borghese heirs sold it to the Italian State.

This refined piece is now resting on a Neoclassical structure, possibly designed by the architect Antonio Asprucci (Gregori 1966, pp. 3, 129), that replaced a ‘wooden foot … entirely covered with gold and carved with leaves and an eagle on the front and four  putti in the corners riding four dragons’ (Montelatici 1700, pp. 219–220) that was probably ill suited to the rest of the piece, which was reworked in about the 1770s. This base in turn replaced a walnut foot ‘carved with terms’ (Manilli 1650, p. 81) that fit well with the rest of the room in the mid seventeenth century, dialoguing with the collection of ancient statues.

Following a typical Roman model, set by the example of the Farnese Table (Gonzáles-Palacios 2004, pp. 261, 280), this top has a large oval in the centre in Asian alabaster, inserted in a panel of nero antico marble, decorated with flowers and foliate volutes in lapis lazuli, agate, onyx and jasper, all surrounded by a band with roundels in breccia quintilina and inlay in Spanish brocatello, verde antico marble and semesanto, the latter a stone, thus renamed by Roman stone-cutters, with granules that resemble pills. The use of these stones and some of the decoration, such as the large central oval, the shield shapes and the border with geometric shapes inside the oval, point to Roman production in the second half of the sixteenth century, distancing it from the Florentine milieu it had been linked to in the past, based on the stylised rendering of the flowers and the five-petal corolla (S. Staccioli, in Opere in mosaico 1971, pp. 42–43). The latter was a motif typical of Florentine workshops in the second half of the sixteenth century, but also popular in Rome, as attested by the Farnese Table, which was made in 1565 after designs by Jacopo Barozzi il Vignola (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. S8.57a-d; Raggio 1959-1960, p. 231; Gonzáles-Palacios 2001, p. 50) and the one formerly in the Burnay Collection, which was made in Rome a few decades later (Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, inv. 1301; see M. Sousa, in Henri Burnay 2003, pp. 218–220).

As noted by Sara Staccioli (in Pittura su pietra 1970, pp. 42–43), the decoration of this tabletop is similar to that of one that belonged to William Beckford, which had been in Palazzo Borghese, Campo Marzio (see Wainwright 1971, p. 52). It seems to have been taken from that location during the Napoleonic campaigns and brought to Paris, where it was acquired by the famous traveller (Charlecote Park, Warwickshire: Wainwright 1971, p. 52; Gonzáles-Palacios 2001, p. 73). Unfortunately, as with that piece, no suggestions have been made for the attribution of the Borghese top, nor has it been possible to link it to anyone who made similar objects in Rome during that period (Calderon Table, Madrid, Museo del Prado, inv. 0000448; Grimani Table, private collection, previously Sotheby's, London, 10 December 2015, lot 202), which are also still lacking an attribution.

However, we can imagine the context within which our expert artisan worked, active in Rome at the end of the sixteenth century in a worksite like those of the Sistine, Gregorian and Clementine chapels, amidst famous architects and talented artisans. The creator of the Borghese top would have certainly been familiar with, among others, the Florentine architect Giovanni Antonio Dosio (Morrogh 2011, pp. 447–448) and the Lombard sculptor Giovanni Battista Della Porta, who decorated the Caetani Chapel in Santa Pudenziana, Rome and ran a workshop specialised in polychrome marble with his brother, Tommaso.

As is well known, the Borghese family not only purchased a large number of ancient statues but also a vast quantity of semiprecious stone and marble sheets that had belonged to Giovanni Battista, and it is not difficult to imagine that this sophisticated piece was among them. It would have been made in a workshop like that of the Della Porta family (if not their workshop), where specialists worked side by side, cutting down large sheets and working small stones to be used for inlaid tables and pictures (Panofsky 1993, pp. 149–152; Ioele 2016, pp. 161–178, 184, 326).

Besides these theories, which are at the moment difficult to support, another possible path leads to the Capitoline residence of Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, who was known at the time for his passion for marble and semiprecious stones coming from ancient monuments. We know that the Tuscan prelate distinguished himself both as a purchaser of tables and for having set up a kind of workshop for making stone tops in Palazzo Firenze (Giusti 2018, p. 121). The presence of this unique workshop, active starting in 1565 in the middle of Rome, where Roman and Medici taste for commesso met, suggests that the Borghese table was one of the pieces made under the Florentine cardinal’s attentive eye, and later passed to the Borghese collection. This idea is connected to the fact that three paintings, commissioned from Jacopo Zucchi by Ferdinando de' Medici, took the same route for reasons that still remain unclear, moving from the vast Medici collection to the Galleria Borghese, where they remain today (inv. 010, 292, 293). This theory, which still needs to be proven, would explain, among other things, not only the absence of payments for such a valuable object in the Borghese account books, but also the links between its style and the drawings by Dosio and models by Vignola.

Antonio Iommelli