A Pair Of Italian Lacquered Wood Console

A rare pair of Neo-classical oval shaped console. Both delicately sculpted and lacquered.

Each with a green, white and grey oval shaped marble top, above a frieze ornamented with foliage and flowers, raised on legs in the form of tapering pilaster surmounted by women busts draped with garlands.

The shape and the ornamentation of the console are typical of the Neo-classical style.

Neo-classicism was the successor to Rococo in the second half of the 18th century and was itself superseded by various historicist styles in the first half of the 19th century. It formed an integral part of THE ENLIGHTENMENT in its radical questioning of received notions of human endeavour. It was also deeply involved with the emergence of new historical attitudes towards the past that were stimulated by an unprecedented range of archaeological discoveries, extending from southern Italy and the eastern Mediterranean to Egypt and the Near East, during the second half of the 18th century: The remarkable burst of archaeological activity served to encourage a growing awareness of historical change and of the almost limitless fund of inspiration offered by the diverse cultures that comprised antiquity, especially the striking discoveries in Roman domestic life, gradually uncovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii, from 1748.

Italian work, beginning of the XIXth century