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Ancient Rome and the revival of ancient skills,’ says William Strafford, a senior specialist in European furniture and decorative arts at Christie’s. ‘Through the reuse of ancient stones, it offered Renaissance patrons a magi-cal connection with antiquity. It also appealed to princes who combined an interest in scien-tific marvels with a delight in cultural wonders and painting. It was an elite production then and has remained one of the pinnacles of elite collecting.’ Testimony to this is that the most expensive decorative work of art ever sold at auction is the Badminton Cabinet, which sold at Christie’s London in 2004 for just over £19m (Fig. 2). Commissioned by Henry Somerset, 3rd Duke of Beaufort, it was made in the Galleria dei Lavori between 1726 and 1732, under the supervision of the renowned Foggini family. Strafford says that the market has always been strong for exceptional pieces in France, Germany, the UK and the US, but that with the rapid recent expansion of the art market, there has been interest from Latin America and Asia. He reports that in 2012 a pietra dura and ebony casket on an enamel-mounted stand, made in Florence around 1710–20, sold at Christie’s London to an Asian buyer for £657,250. ‘It married exceptional craftsmanship with precious materials and an appealing trompe l’oeil conceit,’ he says.

João Magalhães, Sotheby’s senior specialist in continental furniture, notes that it was in the late 17th century, when Giovanni Battista Fog-gini (1652–1725) took charge of the Galleria dei Lavori, that Florentine craftsmanship reached its apex. ‘The technique became exceptional and the designers more ambitious,’ he says. Recently collectors have shown an interest in earlier pieces, before the techniques of Roman and Florentine craftsmen became differenti-ated. In July 2015 a pair of cabinets probably commissioned by a member of the Borghese family around 1625 were bought for £1.3m in London. (They were later acquired by the Fitz-william after being export-stopped.) In 2016 another splendid Borghese cabinet from the Robert de Balkany collection, dated around 1620 and later owned by George IV, sold to the Getty for €2.5m in Paris. And in December 2015 the Grimani Tables, two exquisitely pat-terned tabletops carved from antique marble and inlaid with pietra dura between 1580 and 1620, sold for a combined total of £5.1m.

Part of the appeal of the more expensive of the two (£3.5m) may have been the very pure provenance. Inlaid with the arms and symbols of the Grimani, a prominent Vene-tian family, the tabletop’s ownership can be traced by descent through the Grimani family until bought in 1829 by the Earl of Warwick for Warwick Castle, from where it was acquired by the vendor. ‘The English have had a very important role to play,’ says Magalhães. ‘Since

the 17th century they have been buying these pieces. In the 18th century, with the grand tour, the market was huge.’ He tells me that the English valued pietra dura so highly that they would have the pieces mounted in fur-niture created by the finest Italian or English craftsmen. Sotheby’s London will offer two figurative pietra dura panels dated to 1704 by Baccio Cappelli (who also made panels for the Badminton Cabinet) in its Treasures sale on 4 July (estimate £40,000–£60,000).

Birmingham-based Thomas Coulborn & Sons is bringing a remarkable collection, priced at £175,000, of 23 highly decorative pietra dura panels to Masterpiece London. Depicting birds and flowers, they were made in the Florentine workshops around 1650 (Fig. 3). ‘Collectors today are blown away by the complexity of the technique, which celebrates both the wondrous raw material and the artistry of the carver,’ says Jona-than Coulborn. He finds that ‘the technical brilliance of the early pieces is a great help in distinguishing 17th-century from later panels’. He also has an elegant George II mahogany cabinet and stand created around 1755 to display 16 pictorial Florentine panels from the late 17th century (£275,000), and an ornate gilt casket made in England around 1856–60, which incorporates 16th-, 17th- and 19th-century Florentine pietra dura panels (£125,000). London-based Butchoff Antiques, also exhibiting at Masterpiece, often stocks pieces incorporating 19th-century Floren-tine pietra dura. ‘Over the last 10 years there has been a renaissance of interest in black furniture as a whole,’ says Butchoff’s James Kaye, ‘including ebonised pietra dura pieces, especially among Russian and Middle East-ern buyers.’ The dealership has also sold three specimen tabletops, designed purely to show off different types of marble, with no addition of precious stones, in the last few months. These were hugely popular in England in the 1820s and 1830s, and in Paris in the 1850s through to the 1870s.

‘People in the past knew hugely more about stones and geology than we do and were fascinated by them,’ says London dealer James Graham-Stewart. He occasionally has a Roman specimen tabletop. ‘The collector mar-ket is all about outstanding quality,’ he says. London-based Benappi Fine Art will show an exceptional inlaid marble tabletop dated 1565–68 during London Art Week (29 June–6 July). This elegant geometric piece shows off the beauty of various antique marbles and is from the same period as Vasari’s ‘tavolino di gioie’. It has recently been attributed to Jean Ménard (active from 1552), Michelangelo’s marble cutter. ‘We normally focus on paintings and sculptures but this is of an utmost qual-ity,’ says gallery manager Harry Gready. o

Visitors to the stand of Robilant + Voena at this year’s TEFAF Maastricht were astonished by a Renaissance tabletop

on display. Constructed of hardstones – includ-ing lapis lazuli, jasper and agate – inlaid in white marble in an elaborate pattern, this rare example of Florentine pietra dura was once owned by the 1st Duke of Westminster. Luca Burzio, the Italian dealer who has brought it to market, prefers to call it ‘il tavolino di gioie’, which is how Vasari describes it in the second edition of his Lives. It was Vasari himself who designed it for Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and it was almost certainly

realised by the gem carver Bernardino Porfirio da Leccio between 1568 and 1577. It is one of only three known examples of pietra dura tables to date from the 16th century – another, made for Philip II of Spain in 1587, is now in the Prado. Priced at £8m, it will again be displayed by Robilant + Voena at Masterpiece London later this month (Fig. 1; 28 June–4 July).

A taste for objects made from cut pieces of antique marble had begun in early 16th-cen-tury Rome while Francesco’s father, Cosimo I, had a passion for hardstone vases carved from Persian lapis lazuli or rock crystal. This table, however, marks the beginning of the

Renaissance craze for true pietra dura, using precious hard stones. In 1588 Francesco’s younger brother, Ferdinando, founded the Galleria dei Lavori, a collection of workshops patronised by the court, with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (as it was renamed in the mid 1800s) dedicated entirely to this new art form. Despite competition from Rudolf II’s Castrucci workshop in Prague and Louis XIV’s Gobelins factory, both headed by Italian craftsmen, it is Florentine workmanship above all which has been sought after ever since.

‘Pietra dura was bound in to the central concept of the Renaissance – the rebirth of

Collectors’ FocusPietra Dura Emma Crichton-MillerThe Renaissance craze for pietra dura was driven by elite patrons such as the Medici, Borghese and Grimani families. Today the market for this opulent art form is expanding, with burgeoning interest from Russia, Asia and the Middle East

3. Panel depicting a parrot, c. 1650, Florence, pietra dura, 30 × 24 × 2.3cm. Thomas Coulborn & Sons, £175,000 (collection of 23 panels)

1. The Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici Tabletop, c. 1568–77, Bernardino Porfirio da Leccio (active 1557–88), Florence, pietra dura set into white marble support on an English giltwood stand, length 160cm. Burzio, £8m

2. The Badminton Cabinet, 1720–32, Baccio Cappelli, with bronze figures by Girolamo Ticciati (1676–1744), pietra dura panels, ebony and ormolu, ht 386cm. Christie’s London, £19m