A Florentine style Pietre Dure Inlaid Table

A large Pietre-Dure inlaid marble table, the top decorated with repeating Florentine Renaissance style Classical patterns, including scrolls of stylised foliate motifs and a formal border. The artisan who inlaid this top made these intricate images by using hand-cut pieces of exotic marble and of semi-precious stones, which were inserted piece by piece into shaped hollows carved into the solid black marble slab, each of the hollows made for each of the images.

The table stands on on a purpose-made and sturdy forged steel base decorated with scrolled legs and gilt highlights.

Pietre Dure is a 15th century Florentine Renaissance technique borrowed from the ancient Greeks and Romans, where a marble slab is very precisely chiselled away to accommodate shaped inlay pieces to create images. Typically, several inlaid parts are required to be assembled, to form a single motif or a part of a pattern.