An Italian carved giltwood console table, Florence, circa 1787

Comparative Literature

E. Colle, I Mobili di Palazzo Pitti, Il primo periodo lorenese, 1737-1799, Florence 1992, p. 120, n. 49;

A. González-Palacios, I Mobili nitaliani, Il patrimonio artistico del Quirinale, Milan 1996, p. 192, n. 61.

This exquisite console appears to have been part of a series of tables with slight variations in shape, of which three are now at Palazzo Pitti. These were in the new apartments of the Grand Duke Ferdinando III in 1791. Three others are now in the Palazzo delle Quirinale, but previously were at the Palazzo Reale in Pisa. AGP also mentions one other, larger, console at Castello di Racconiggi as potentially part of this series.

Some of the ornamental solutions as well as overall feel relate closely to documented examples by Lorenzo Dolci, an ebanista and intagliatore particularly active for the granducal court in the last decades of the 18^th century (see Colle, p. 121 and 139).