POSSIBLY IRISH, CIRCA 1750, THE VERDE ANTICO TOPS PROBABLY ROMAN

These remarkable consoles, their uprights in the form of leafy trees issuing from a rockwork base of vines and roots, are the very embodiment of the rococo style, which has at its core a playful and free naturalism. They reflect the pittoresque style of the 1730s and 1740s promoted by designers such as Nicolas Pineau in France, Batty Langley, whose The City Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs, appeared in 1740 with related patterns for ‘marble tables’, and in England above all by Thomas Johnson, who cheerfully embraced this riotous naturalism and whose Collection of Designs of 1758 featured very similar tree-form consoles (illustrated here). The conceit of carving supports in the form of trees also existed in Rome as far back as the seventeenth century for instance on a table in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, attributed to the celebrated Italian baroque architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, carved in the form of a tree and supporting his marble figure of San Lorenzo (see A. González-Palacios, Il Tempio del Gusto, Roma e il Regno delle Due Sicilie, 1984, Milan, vol.I, p. 56, fig. VII). Two designs for related tables in the Stockholm National Museum are illustrated op. cit., vol. II, figs. 181-2. This distinctively Roman tradition was continued into the eighteenth century, for instance on a pair of corner consoles carved with oak trees, one of a set of five supplied to Cardinal Flavio II Chigi, the oak tree being the emblem of the Chigi family. A closely related pair of consoles was supplied to Marcus Beresford, 1st Earl of Tyrone (1694-1763), for his country seat Curraghmore, County Waterford, leading to the intriguing possibility that the tables offered here could also be Irish (sold anonymously Christie’s, London, 3 July 1997, lot 90 (£221,500) and also illustrated in The Knight of Glin & J. Peill, Irish Furniture, New Haven, 2007, fig. 163.)