18th Century Furniture - Italy

During the first half of the 18th century, most of the Italian states came under the control of Spain and Austria. Only Venice, Genoa, and Lucca remained independent, although the republics of Venice and Genoa declined in power and population.

Italian Rococo
Italy was no longer a cultural leader in Europe. The noble landowners who built large palazzos were conservative on the whole and the Baroque style was favoured for longer than elsewhere. The only concession to changing fashions, however, was that handmade furniture for the main deception rooms was now conceived as an integral part of the interior.
Gradually, during the second quarter of the 18th century, as interiors became less formal, the lighter and more graceful Rococo style became more prevalent, reaching the height of its popularity from 1730 to 1750.
Italian Rococo furniture was mainly influenced by French Regence and Louis XV styles, but it was embellished with decorative lacquerwork, colourful paintwork, and extravagant carved details. Styles of furniture varied considerably from one region to another. Craftsmen in Piedmont were strongly influenced by neighbouring France, and Genoese furniture was renowned for its skillful construction.
Furniture from Lombardy was more sober and severe, whereas Venetian fitted and non fitted furniture was theatrical and colourful.

Sicilian Commode

The rectangular moulded top above a fall front opening to reveal two long internal drawers, raised on square tapering legs, the top, front and sides all decorated with stylised birds and flowering branches within a stylised dentillated rope-twist and entwined floral vine border within a pale blue faux-marble surround.

The overall form of this commode, with its pure, uninterrupted rectilinear silhouette and square tapering legs with block feet, is entirely typical of chests of drawers produced throughout Italy in the 1780s. However, the idiosyncratic use of a vibrantly coloured turquoise marbling around the borders of this piece of antique furniture would seem to directly echo the characteristically late 18th-century Sicilian practice of mounting furniture with painted glass panels simulating marble and semiprecious stone.

The bright colours and bold, simplified two-dimensional outlines of the birds and flowers are inspired by imported Chinese silks and wallpapers and probably would have formed part of a Chinese room, the taste for which remained unabated throughout 18th and 19th-century Sicily. The most celebrated Chinoiserie interiors on the island are those of the Palazzino Cinese in the Parco della Favorita in Palermo, built for the exiled court of King Ferdinand IV of Naples between 1798 and 1806, and recently re-opened after a twenty-year restoration programme. The internal decoration represents a highly particular fusion of oriental and then-fashionable neoclassical motifs, a trait also seen in the commode’s integration of a dentillated border with interlaced flowers.

Carved Console

A Very Fine and Large Early 18th Century Italian Rococo Giltwood Carved Console Table with a Castracane marble top of serpentine outline, all 24kt gilding original. Circa: Venice, 1720.