This very fine Art Nouveau marble matel was dismantled by us in Saint Denis, a very pretty little city of about 100,000 inhabitants close to Paris, which developed mainly in the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, following the Art Nouveau winds, a town that today, unfortunately, has the highest crime rate in all of France, the highest rate of radicalized Muslim terrorist militants, and the highest rate of Islamic inhabitants (more than 60% of residents).
The landscape today is demeaning and dangerous, and so, very quickly, Saint Denis loses its former inhabitants who, as you will easily understand, are basically forced to flee.
And today this unfortunately decaying Beauty represents for us a kind of important as well as refined source of finds.
The fireplace I am presenting to you has these important features:
A) First of all, its Baroque architectural structure, which represented a very important point of contact between the classical past and the above-mentioned Floral Art (Art Nouveau).
It would have been difficult (or at least, much more difficult) to replace the old patterns, the usual lines, with the modern unknown Art Nouveau overnight, and so many architects (they were the “designers of the day”) tried to maintain a Baroque-like design on which to work with details and novelties, precisely, floral;
B) The classic shell in the center of the frontal (let us remember that Baroque stylism was also called “Rocaille,” a word that in this case means “shell”) disappears and in its place appear graceful “sea urchins” (BOUCLES DE MER), which urchins also replace the pair of small shells at the sides of the frontal and the cartouches at the foot of the fireplace;
C) Its height measurements, definitely important than the traditional ones, will make the chimney itself MUCH more slender. In any case a twist, if you will “technical”, also due to the fact that in that period of greater wealth of populations, we realize how the man of the nineteenth century was lower and poorer than the new man, the twentieth century. And as a result, whether because of the greater height of dwellings or the greater physical height of men, it was necessary and believed right to propose “New” Measures for fireplaces as well.
PERFECT ITS PRESERVATION, REFINED ITS MARBLE FABRIC, PERIOD OF BIRTH AT THE TURN OF THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY.
