Ebony cabinet with paintings, Italy 17th century

Rare travel cabinet in ebony veneer and blackened wood.
Rectangular in shape, it rests on four raven legs and opens with a large drawer in the lower part, two leaves on the front and a flap positioned on the top.
The two leaves reveal a theater composed of nine drawers and a central niche.
The fronts of the drawers, the door of the niche and the reverses of the two leaves are decorated with oil paintings set in guilloché strips.
These twelve “tabletintins” represent rural and port scenes with a predominantly blue-gray sky characteristic of Dutch productions.
The door to the niche reveals a locker whose bottom is decorated with a mercury mirror.
Its interior and the interior of the large drawer are lined with old red block-printed wallpaper.

Beautiful state of conservation; small usual restorations.

Work from northern Italy from the mid-17th century.

Dimensions:

Height: 51 cm; Width: 46cm; Depth: 26.5 cm

Our opinion :

The style of the travel cabinet that we are presenting, with its ebony veneer, its upper dome and its guilloché strips, is typically Antwerp.
But the resinous wood used for the backgrounds takes us back to production in northern Italy, the region where we bought it, in its “juice”, that is to say never restored.
This Italian production appeared at the end of the 16th century, particularly in Naples, where many Flemish artists came to offer their services to the House of Habsburg Spain.
This is the case of artists like Jacopo Fiamengo (literally the Flemish) who works for the royal armory where he decorates crossbows, powder horns...before offering a luxurious production of cabinets, writing desks...for the nobility came in numbers for the big tour.
Another household, located near the famous Negroli armory workshop in Milan, prospered in the same way during the same period.
The paintings are the work of local painters, from the various Italian schools which developed at the end of the 17th century. (Bologna, Milan, Naples..)
The preciousness of this type of furniture made it suitable for a small “studio” type cabinet of curiosities, where rare stones, small antique sculptures, curiosities such as animal horns, coral, etc. were presented.