ON HOLD
If you swear to me that you will not laugh, I will tell you why I used the hyperbolic term of “fantastic” referring to the Breccia with which our fireplace was carved.
Well, then I will confess to you that, as soon as I crossed the threshold of the construction site from which we retrieved it, it may have been the light of that coastal-blue morning, it may have been that “the masson” (the contractor) who was selling it to me had wet it all over with the rubber of water (he had done it to clean it of quintals of dust but in this way he made its surfaces highly polished . .) it may have been what God willed, the fact is that to me it appeared not as a fireplace but as one of those Star Trek shots, the kind that shows you the galaxy as you are passing through it at a thousand kilometers per second, the Milky Way to the right and a thousand planets or asteroids brushing against me left and right...
A VISION, INDEED, FANTASTIC!!!
The fact is that even now, every time I see the large marble “pediment” ( doesn't it look like a kind of screen too?) of this spectacular fireplace, I have the same vision and the same feeling of traveling through space, of entering another dimension.
PROVENANCE CÔTE D'AZUR, PERIOD 1925-40, IMPECCABLE PRESERVATION.
Mind you, within Art Deco fireplaces the choice of marbles of particular quality and chromaticism is, numerically speaking, significantly higher than in ALL other fireplace mantel families.
A marble of aesthetic refinement was in fact an important, perhaps indispensable “support” to a design that made minimalism its banner.
If white was to be its color, then it could not be a “normal” Carrara White (with which most of the most important “classic” fireplaces from the Renaissance to Art Nouveau were also made) but at least a Carrara from the noble Calacata quarry, or a Carrara Statuario or, what do I know, a fantastic Pavonazzetto, all marbles belonging to the Great Carrara White Family but all residing at the “upper levels.”
Unlike in the fireplaces of earlier styles, in which the percentage of white specimens was roughly eighty percent, in the Art Deco style the situation appears to be more than reversed and Carrara White will be found in one fireplace in twenty!!!
They really were revolutionaries, these modernists!!!
But let's go to the fireplace I should present here instead of getting lost in “generalizing disquisitions” (that's what my talking cricket calls them while I, on the other hand, am convinced that those who will fall in love with this fireplace will want to have the broadest possible knowledge of it and not be dismissed with two numbers and two cold pragmatic phrases), which fireplace offers us on a silver platter proof of what I stated above about Art Deco choices regarding marbles: The slabs and blocks of the Pyrenean Breccia in this specimen have an incredible quality, the result of a more than careful selection on the part of the sculptor but also the result of a good bag from the commissioning party. PURE WHITE AND PURE BLACK, A KIND OF STARRY, LUMINOUS SKY....
IF A PAINTER (LEONARDO DA VINCI EXCLUDED) HAD TRIED TO ARTIFICIALLY CREATE THIS FASCINATING MIXTURE NEVER WOULD HAVE ACHIEVED THIS MIRACULOUS RESULT.
Also interesting is the fact that “ours” comes equipped with its marble floor of origin. It is not the rarest of things for a fireplace to possess its marble floor, RARE is being able to extract it intact from the marble floor that held it for so long. In fact, either because the marble floor was continually slaughtered by the weight of “passers-by,” or because the floors of the Antique were as “light” as ever and flexed, in the vast majority of cases in which fireplaces in possession of a marble floor are disassembled, the marble floor itself is reduced to a puzzle of dozens of marble parts, a puzzle that is impossible to reassemble.
But the Niçoise villa from which we noctetempo rub.... ehmm … disassembled the marble floor enjoyed a healthy and robust physical constitution and returned to us intact the elegant accessory in question.
