More or less once a month I go to Paris to visit building sites and to practice my favorite sport, the search for antique fireplaces.
Paris is certainly the Homeland of the antique fireplace, the scepter of international stylism, starting at the end of the Renaissance passed from Italian hands to Parisian hands, which have never left it since.
It is therefore, that city, a veritable mine of sculpture (Italian, eh, because if stylism was French -better to say “Parisian”- sculpture was delegated to the Italians of the Carrara area, Pietrasanta in primis..). And so it happens that every time there is a good reason to make that trip, a particular fireplace, a cartouche or a sculpted flower to fall in love with.
And to think that my wife is convinced that I, in Paris, have a lover, she fails to understand that, instead, I fall in love every time I go there, yes, but not with a woman, but with a… fireplace!!!
This time the Falling in Love was triggered by this splendid Louis XV mantel in equally Splendid and candid Carrara Statuary marble, in the forms of which decorative and artistic elements rarely found all together are combined:
A) The Strength: Perhaps the published photographs do not render the idea, but this fireplace is made (as indeed it should be in that era that had just left the first half of the nineteenth century behind it..) with decidedly greater thicknesses than the fireplaces of the second half of the same century;
B) The Elegance: Not that the fireplaces of his period are clumsy, but they are certainly generally “heavier,” in short, more baroque, while this example has sinuous lines, almost light despite its important and generous measurements;.
C) Its floral decorations: Here, this seemingly unimportant little chapter expresses instead the reason for my sudden falling in love with it.. Let me explain further: in the period of this fireplace's birth, there were very few patterns of floral and leaf decoration and therefore very “repeated..” Here, on the other hand, we are faced with a completely unusual floral design for that era, a greater stylistic-decorative freedom that foreshadows what will happen in the second half of the same century, which will see the appearance of Art Nouveau. Moreover, in this model of fireplace and in contrast to almost all of its Louis XV brethren, the decorations on the front are deliberately and happily asymmetrical.. No specularity of figures, no “caging” in pre-established and apparently immovable modules, but an open path to freedom.
PARISIAN FIND, EARLY NAPOLEON III PERIOD, CARRARA STATUARY MARBLE, EXCELLENT OVERALL PRESERVATION (ONLY MINOR RESTORATION WORK WAS DONE TO THE PLATFORM, NO REPLACEMENT OF MARBLE PARTS), CARRARA SCULPTURE.
