VENETIAN CHEST OF DRAWERS AND TWO BEDSIDE TABLES 

VENETIAN CHEST OF DRAWERS AND TWO BEDSIDE TABLES

Venice, mid-18th century

Chest of drawers cm 134 x 55 x 86h

Bedside tables cm 56 x 35 x 75h

The architecture of this extraordinary set, moved by a skilful play of undulations, is covered with a spectacular rosewood veneer. The silhouette of the chest of drawers  and bedside tables, straight with sinuous supports, has a choppy front with two drawers and concave  sides. The shaped tops are in snail marble of gray-green color.   

The grace of lacquer and the solemnity of the gilded furniture must not make us forget that, in the 18th century, the prestige of the Venetian maker was also entrusted to thebuilders of polished wooden furniture, this furniture just as beautiful and sometimes more suggestive than the lacquered mobility.

If lacquer was born out of a desire to place on the market substitutes  for orientally produced products, which were very expensive and practically impossible to find, natural wood furniture was a spontaneous production in a city where, the techniques of wooden sculpture and intarsio boasted a centuries old tradition. The very difficult art of bending wood, indispensable to the Rococo taste, had been refined through the centuries old research and work of boat builders, but above all of the builders of the most beautiful and complicated boats in the world: gondolas. It is to these masters, that Venetian furniture players must invent the technical means to make their unparalleled objects so rich and varied that they ask many questions to those who try to steal their secrets.

Reference bibliography:

Saul Levy, The Venetian Furniture of the eighteenth century, tav. No 107.

Santini, Mille mobili veneti, p.89, fig. 112.