Many people don't know (especially the "all-knowing" antiquarians, those who, with signed scarf, erremosed lip and Patek Philippe on their wrist, flaunt expertise in all antiquarian scholasticism...) many people don't know, I was saying, that this antique fireplace is the daddy of all nineteenth-century fireplaces... Or rather of all “bourgeois” fireplaces (you will understand later the meaning of this strange adjective “bourgeois”).
The story of its birth went, more or less, like this: It is 1815-20, Napoleon Bonaparte has left a Europe shaken by his prowess, but full of innovative ferment, and provided with new as well as more “democratic” wealth...
In France in particular, the bourgeoisie, which until a few decades earlier was sparse and heavily subordinated to the nobility and clergy, became the first and powerful source of wealth...
And as is the case everywhere, the new rich, the “parvenu” (a term by which the French aristocrats derisively referred to those bourgeois who were accessing new social comforts...), in an attempt (I must say very successful...) to imitate the Berlusconi of the time and the nobility in particular, also decided to have in every room of their house a nice fireplace!!!
But... as affluent as they were compared to their serf ancestors, these “parvenus” were after all shopkeepers, artisans, officials, bureaucrats of no very high status, at most directors of a bank branch or secondary tax collectors...
They could not, therefore, spend as much on magnificence of furnishings as the true aristocrats, and so they fell back on a model of fireplace that involved costs within their reach..
Thus it was that our Louis XV Bombé fireplace, harmonious yet without excess, was the first mass-produced fireplace to satisfy the emulative anxiety of the bourgeois parvenu.
Oh my, it's not as if any manufacturer of the time was making “Chinese” quantities of them, but already the fact of designing and making series of a few dozen intended to be marketed within the bourgeoisie was a nice step toward the fireplacedemocracy..
I would have a thousand things to tell you about this splendid as well as modest fireplace, but space is a tyrant, I will write here, again and only, that this fireplace, besides being the progenitor of an incredible family of “European” fireplaces (don't call them “French,” French was the stylism, but the sculpture was mostly Carrara or, at most, Belgian, very rarely French . .) is also the (carnal..) daddy of the most famous and built 19th-century fireplace, the legendary Pompadur plat, whose birth occurred around 1850 and would last at least until around 1910.
THIS MANTEL DATES BACK TO THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, WAS MADE OF “YELLOW FLOWERED” MARBLE, AN ANCIENT PYRENEAN QUARRY THAT HAS BEEN COMPLETELY EXHAUSTED FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY. HIS SCULPTURE WAS ALMOST CERTAINLY MADE BY BASQUE SCULPTORS, WHO, “SKIPPING” THE PYRENEES THEMSELVES, WENT TO THE CÔTE D'AZUR (WHERE OUR SPECIMEN WAS FOUND) TO WORK IN THE SCULPTURE WORKSHOPS RUN BY THE FRENCH IN THE CITIES (NICE AND MARSEILLE) EQUIPPED WITH PORTS, IN WHICH THEY COULD ARRIVE, WITH THE LOWEST POSSIBLE TRANSPORTATION COST, MARBLES FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. PERFECT CONDITION.
