CIRCA 1860

Finely sculpted from pure Carrara marble with playful cherubs, this magnificent chimney-piece is a celebration of the creation of a unified Italy, commemorating the Treaty of Turin which in 1860 concluded between France and Sardinia-Piedmont the annexation of the Duchy of Savoy and the County of Nice to Napoleon III’s France. Consequently, France forced Austria ‘to cede Lombardy to Sardinia-Piedmont thus creating a power centre in Northern Italy strong enough to attract the allegiance of the rest of the country. By 1861 Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont was King of Italy with the exception of Rome (the Papal State) and Venice, which remained Austrian. In 1864, the French occupied Rome with Italian consent, neutralizing the secular power of the Pope, and Venice became Italian two years later, when Italy joined Prussia in her victorious war against Austria’ (H.W. Janson, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, Washington, 1985, p. 129).

This chimney-piece honours this achievement of international diplomacy remarkably free from bloodletting, with impish putti holding the Imperial Standard of Napoléon III welcoming their new compatriots bearing the Cross of Savoy overlooked by equally adorable putti emblematic of conflict. Whoever sculpted this chimney-piece with such a good-humoured interpretation of solemn matters of state, obviously could not foresee Prussia’s defeat of Napoleon III’s France in 1870 and the collapse of the Second French Empire. Such elaborately carved chimney-pieces are exceedingly rare, but an attribution may be made to the Romanelli family of Florence who sculpted a chimney-piece with a procession of putti led by a lion drawn chariot amid billowing clouds, at Carbisdale Castle, Scotland.