An Italian silver wine cooler from the Borghese service by Pietro Paolo Spagna, Rome, circa 1830

Don Camille Borghese, Prince of Sulmona and Rossana (1775-1832)

Sotheby's, Zurich, 13-14 November 1979, lot 24.

Sotheby’s New York, 21 October 2010, lot 54

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, June 1924 - November 1932.

Camille Borghese (1775–1832) came from one of Rome's oldest and most influential families. Seduced by the ideas of the French Revolution, Camille took up arms in 1798. An acquaintance of Joachim Murat, one of Bonaparte's leading generals, he met the First Consul in 1803, who welcomed him enthusiastically. Napoleon wanted to forge alliances with influential European families and decided to marry Pauline, his second sister, to this Roman prince. The union was not a happy one, but it enabled Camille to replenish the family coffers, notably by selling the emperor the fabulous family art collection, most of which is now housed in the Louvre Museum.

The Borghese family, who were passionate about art, commissioned large sets of tableware from the best silversmiths of their time. Marc-Antoine, Camille's father, commissioned Luigi Valadier to create an important tableware set in 1784, considered the most important private commission of the best Roman silversmith of the 18th century. The set is in the neoclassical style, inspired by the discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum a few years earlier.

A few years later, Camille and his wife Pauline commissioned Martin-Guillaume Biennais to create a magnificent silver-gilt service in the purest Empire style, based on designs by Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre-François Fontaine (1762-1853), the Emperor's official ornamentalists. The motifs were based on ancient models that Percier and Fontaine had discovered during their stay in Rome and published in Recueil de décorations intérieures in 1801-1802, which became the bible of the Empire style. This service was completed by Camille with commissions to Italian silversmiths in the 1820s, such as the Scheggi brothers in Florence and Pietro Paolo Spagna in Rome.

Our silver cooler is not part of the large Empire service; its style is much more classical, drawing on French Rococo influences with leafy scroll handles and shells. It must have been part of a larger set, used by the prince in his palace in Rome or in Florence with his wife Pauline, with whom he became close after the Bonapartes were exiled following the fall of the Empire.

Pietro Paolo Spagna (1793-1861)

A goldsmith from a Roman dynasty, he was the son of Giuseppe III. He registered his hallmark in 1817 and bought the workshop and stock of Giuseppe Valadier, son of the great Luigi Valadier and the most important goldsmith in Rome, in 1817. 

For a pair of silver wine coolers from the same service, see A. Gonazles-Palacio, Il tempio del gusto, les arti decorativi in Italia fra classicismi e barocco Roma e il Regno delle Due Sicilie, 1984, p.145, ill. 328