The Farnese Table

A marble table made in Rome in the later 1560s for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, designed by Vignola, its piers carved in the palace workshop of Guglielmo della Porta and its pietre dure top believed to be the work of the French inlayer Jean Menard. Every coloured stone in it is ancient. Many came out of the Baths of Caracalla, which the cardinal was excavating; the two Egyptian alabaster panels at the centre were probably stripped from Egyptian monuments in antiquity, which makes them spoil taken twice.

It is dated by heraldry: Alessandro adopted the arms carved on the piers only in 1566, and Vignola died in 1573. A palace inventory of 1653 records that in the cardinal's absence a table whose three marble supports alone weigh nearly four thousand pounds was kept in a padlocked wooden box on a wool mattress under a quilted cloth, with a cover of gilded leather.

It is in the Palazzo Farnese inventory of 1796 and not in the one of 1834; the next record of it is a fire-insurance paper for Hamilton Palace in Scotland drawn up shortly after 1844. The Museum offers two incompatible accounts of that gap on the same page, one a tradition about a convent in Verona and one a supposition about a grand tourist. It was sold at Christie's in 1919 to Lord Leverhulme, returned to a Roman dealer at an unrecorded date, and reached New York in 1958. A recent examination found paint residues on the piers, which the Museum says may change how the object is understood.

A table built out of the Baths of Caracalla

Every coloured stone in this table is ancient, and many of them came out of the Baths of Caracalla, where excavation began in the 1540s under the supervision of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. The two panels of Egyptian alabaster in the centre were probably stripped from Egyptian monuments and carried to Italy in antiquity, which makes them spoil taken twice.

That is the fact to start from, because it is what the object is. A Renaissance cardinal excavated an imperial bath complex he did not own in any modern sense, took its marbles, and had them cut up and reset as the top of a table for his own state rooms. For him and for his architects and masons the stones stood for the opulence of a vanished empire, and reusing them was physical proof that Rome was the Eternal City. It is also, in plain terms, a quarry operation on a ruin.

The Museum's curator puts the second half of the thought as well: the men who did it were not imitating the ancients but attempting to surpass them, superatio rather than imitatio.

What it is

A slab of white marble on three marble piers. The top is inlaid in the ancient Roman manner with many different coloured marbles and with semiprecious hardstones - pietre dure - so densely that the white matrix shows only as the lines separating medallions, cartouches, rectangles and ovals. At the centre, inside black slate borders set with pietre dure rosettes and stylised lilies, are the two panels of Egyptian alabaster.

Each pier is carved on its long sides with a grotesque torso and a coat of arms, and at each end with a sphinx emerging from foliage. The arms carry six lilies on oval panels under a cross and a galero, a cardinal's hat.

The wide outer border of the top is rosso antico, and in it the Farnese lilies are bracketed by pairs of peltae, the stylised crescent shields of Roman art, arranged so that they guard the lilies as armed men guard a dignitary. That reading is the Museum's, and it is the kind of thing that only becomes visible once you know the border is a heraldic statement rather than a pattern.

It can be dated by a coat of arms

Alessandro Farnese adopted the coat of arms carved on the piers only in 1566. Vignola's design therefore cannot predate that year. Vignola died in 1573. Inventories of the Palazzo Farnese taken in 1566 and 1568 list other inlaid tables - two of alabaster, two of porphyry, one set with many different stones - but not this one.

The Museum's own date line reads ca. 1565-73, with a machine bracket that opens in 1560, so the catalogue entry's reasoning and the tombstone beside it do not quite agree; and if the table is genuinely absent from the 1568 inventory, the honest floor is 1568 rather than 1566. What the evidence supports is that the table was probably under construction in the later 1560s and certainly by 1573. That is a tighter date than most sixteenth-century furniture carries, and it is arrived at entirely from heraldry and death dates rather than from any contract or payment.

Vignola, della Porta and a Frenchman called Mynardo

Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola began working at the Palazzo Farnese shortly before 1547, under Michelangelo's supervision, and became the cardinal's chief architect around 1550. The table and especially its top were created after his designs. Its ornamental vocabulary is his: the confronted peltae, the broken rectangles enclosing the Farnese lilies, motifs he may have taken from ancient Roman floors such as the one in the Curia of Diocletian, and from the pavements at Ostia, where in 1547 the architects went, in the phrase of the time, to get coloured marbles for the palace.

The carving was done in the palace workshop, which the sculptor Guglielmo della Porta ran. That workshop's business was restoring ancient sculpture and reshaping excavated stone into furnishings. Close inspection of the piers shows that they were carved by more than one person, which is what a supervised workshop looks like: della Porta directed, carved major elements himself and finished the rest.

The inlay is believed to be the work of a little-known French master, Jean Menard, known in Italy as Giovanni Mynardo, reckoned one of the finest craftsmen in stone intarsia and mosaic decoration working in Rome in the 1560s. Three names, three trades, one object, and the Museum's heading gives the design to Vignola, the piers to della Porta and the top to Mynardo without pretending that any of the three did all of it.

The piers may have been painted

The most consequential line in the Museum's catalogue entry is buried in the middle of it. An examination of the piers disclosed slight residues of paint, in small areas, under the profiles supporting the top. The Museum's own words are that this astonishing discovery may change the current estimation of the table, because if the piers were originally painted then the overall appearance of the piece must have been quite different.

The footnote names the man and the moment. The observation was made when the table was moved in 2002, and Jack Soultanian Jr., conservator in the Museum's Department of Objects Conservation, confirmed and further investigated it. The residue is now in the medium line of the machine record, which reads: marble of different colours, semiprecious stones, Egyptian alabaster, residue of paint of different colours on the piers. Different colours, in the plural.

What has not been published is which pigments they are or how much of the piers they covered. What it means is that the object every visitor and every furniture historian has looked at since 1958 - white marble piers against a coloured top - may be the stripped remains of something polychrome, and that this has been known inside the building since a move in 2002.

Guarded like a jewel

An inventory of the Palazzo Farnese compiled in 1653 records how the table was kept. In the owner's absence, the large table of hard and soft stones, its centre of Oriental alabaster, supported by three marble feet in the shape of harpies with the arms of the Lord Cardinal, was protected in a wooden box with a chain that looped to close it and, in the middle, a small mattress full of wool covered with a quilted checkered cloth. There was also a cover for the table of tooled and gilded leather with four fringes, decorated borders and fleurs-de-lys.

The Museum draws the right conclusion from that. The household treated the table as an objet de vertu, something on the order of a gold or rock-crystal bibelot that could be cased and travel with its owner. It is in fact so heavy that even with a modern lifting device it takes a dozen men to move it, and several days. The weight is worth pausing on, because the Museum gives two answers: the gallery audio says some thirty thousand pounds, while the collection record publishes confirmed weights for the three supports that add to 3,893 pounds, with the top never weighed.

A padlocked box and a wool mattress for an object that cannot be lifted is not a security measure. It is a statement about rank.

Where it stood, and who saw it

The table was made for the main hall of the Palazzo Farnese, where it would have sat among the family's paintings and the ancient sculpture - the Farnese Hercules, the Urania, the Flora, the Farnese Bull. It was later moved into the Philosophers' Hall, the elaborately furnished room next to the Carracci Gallery on the Tiber side of the palace, and every seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Roman guidebook that mentions the palace treasures describes it there.

Goethe probably saw it in that room on his visit to Rome in the spring of 1787, on the Museum's account of the date. By then much of the palace had gone: Charles III of Spain, who had inherited it from his Farnese mother, had moved many of the paintings and sculptures to Naples in what the Museum calls one of the largest art transfers in history. Goethe's comment was that if they could take the Carracci Gallery too, they would do it.

The table stayed. It appears in an inventory of the palace made in 1796. It does not appear in one made in 1834.

The gap, and the two stories about it

Between the 1796 inventory and a fire-insurance document drawn up shortly after 1844 for Hamilton Palace in South Lanarkshire, nothing is documented. That is roughly half a century in which a thirty-thousand-pound table left a palace in Rome and arrived in a house in Scotland, and the Museum tells two different stories about it in two different places on the same page.

The provenance field says: by tradition, a convent in Verona, Italy, from which it was acquired by Alexander Hamilton, 10th Duke of Hamilton. The curatorial essay says something else, and flags it as a guess: we may suppose that, like many other Italian antiquities, the treasured table of the Farnese family was acquired by some English or Scottish grandee while on a tour of Italy. Verona is not mentioned in the essay at all.

Neither account carries a document. The tradition of the Verona convent is labelled a tradition by the Museum itself, and the grand tour account is labelled a supposition. What is documented is the Hamilton end: the table is in the fire-insurance paper drawn up after 1844 and in the Hamilton Palace inventories of 1852 and 1876.

Sold out of Hamilton Palace, 1919

The table descended in the Hamilton family until 1919, when it was sold at Christie, Manson and Woods in London on 13 November as lot 333. The buyer was William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, 1851 to 1925, the soap manufacturer who built Port Sunlight, and it went to his London house, The Hill, on Hampstead Heath. The Museum's provenance string renders the name Leverhume and then gives it correctly three words later.

No price is published in any source consulted here, and none should be assumed. Anyone who finds a figure for this lot should establish before quoting it whether it is the sum called in the room or a total including charges, because the two are routinely conflated in later retellings of sales of this period.

Back to Rome, then to New York

After Leverhulme the Museum's chain records only the London art market and then Galleria Sangiorgi, the Rome dealer, from whom the Museum bought the table in 1958 with the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund. No dates are given for either step and no prices for any of them.

The shape of that is worth stating plainly. An object made in Rome in the 1560s left Italy at some undocumented point before 1844, spent about a century in Britain, returned to a Roman dealer at some undocumented point after 1925, and left Italy again for New York in or shortly before 1958. Nothing in the record consulted says whether an Italian export licence was sought or granted for that second departure, or who handled it.

Two years after the purchase, in March 1960, Olga Raggio published it in the Museum's Bulletin as a rediscovered work by Vignola. That article is the reattribution: it took an object that had been a great piece of Roman furniture and made it a documented Vignola design. The Museum still describes it as a model for subsequent studies in the history of furniture.

What is unresolved

The date is close to fixed by the arms and by Vignola's death. The designer, the carving workshop and the inlayer are all named, with the qualification that the piers were carved by more than one hand and the top is only believed to be Mynardo's. The Roman provenance is continuous from the 1560s to 1796 through palace inventories and guidebooks.

Everything between 1796 and 1844 is missing, and the Museum offers two incompatible accounts of it, one labelled tradition and one labelled supposition. The 1919 price is unpublished, the 1958 price is unpublished, the route back to Rome is unrecorded, and the piers appear to have been painted a colour nobody has yet named.

For a piece of furniture that has been in the literature since 1960 and in a palace inventory since 1653, that is a great deal still open.