18th century, Italian Louis XV Lacquered Wood Vanity Dressing Cabinet
The vanity dressing cabinet was made in Italy in Genoa around the middle of the eighteenth century, Louis XV.
Very elegant and refined, the cabinet has a wooden structure entirely lacquered and painted with floral decorations in shades of blue.
The top opens with three flap doors: in the center the door has a mirror inside, while laterally there are two large compartments, lined with precious marbled paper.
On the front there are three drawers, one central and two side, all lined with marbled paper.
The four legs are moved and arched giving gracefulness to the overall architecture.
The manufacture of marbled paper is very old, born in Japan in the twelfth century. It first spread to Persia and Turkey, where it was mainly used for the decoration of manuscripts, then, thanks to Western merchants and their contacts with the Middle East, it spread to the whole West: at that time, in fact, the production of marbled paper intensified to become the preferred technique for lining the inside of boxes then imported into Europe. It was thanks to the trade of Arab merchants that a link between the two cultures was created. During the sixteenth century it conquered and fascinated the whole of Europe where it was defined marbled paper (carta marmorizzata in Italy, paper marbré in France) by the obvious similarity with the veins of marble.
Marbled paper is an ancient technique (it has its roots in Chinese craftsmanship of the 8th Century) as well as laborious and delicate and was used mainly in the bookbinding of ancient books...
Category
Italian Louis XV Antique Mid-18th Century Vanities