A 50-BORE WHEEL-LOCK HOLSTER PISTOL

EARLY 17TH CENTURY AND LATER

細節

A 50-BORE WHEEL-LOCK HOLSTER PISTOL
Early 17th Century and later
With tapering blackened barrel finely chiselled in relief throughout its length on a punched ground retaining traces of gilding with female allegorical figures, two accompanied by Latin mottoes, each within a niche surmounted variously by satyr-masks, putti, and grotesque heads, blued lock stamped on the inner side with a mark, an eagle over a castle, and the letters 'PA' (Carpegna pl. XLIII, no. 46), the outer surface of the plate chiselled with acanthus foliage on the tail and with a running design of fleurs-de-lys in low relief on the border, the wheel cut with a foliate wreath and retained by a bracket chiselled with a mask, foliage, and two female demi-figures in profile, the pan-cover with a male mask and foliage, the cock chiselled as a monster-head in the round supported by a three-dimensional standing figure, signed 'Pavlo (sic) Apiano (sic)' on the inner side and with internal spring and external buffer in the form of a grotesque monster, most of the chiselling with faint traces of a gilt ground, full stock veneered in ebony inlaid with engraved staghorn lines enclosing close-set staghorn panels, some pierced, with minutely engraved decoration of outstanding quality including masks, birds, animals, grotesques, putti, flowers, fruit, landscapes, townscapes, and opposite the lock with Leda and the swan, all on a background inlaid with delicate scrolls, swags and dots, hexagonal lemon-shaped pommel with turned staghorn button, finely engraved white staghorn ramrod-pipes, parcel-gilt iron trigger-guard chiselled in the round with an armorino and a monster-head, overlapping scales, and foliage, chiselled trigger, finely engraved staghorn fore-end cap, and wooden ramrod with horn tip en suite
28 in. (73 cm.)

來源

Rothschild inv. no. LR341.

出版

A. Gaibi, Le Armi da Fuoco Portatili Italiane, Milan, 1962, pl. 55B.
Idem, Le Armi da Fuoco Portatili Italiane, Milan, 1968, pl. 150b.
H. Schedelmann, Die Grossen Bchsenmacher, Brunswick, 1972, pp. 61-2, pls. 114-16, dated to circa 1600.
N. di Carpegna, Brescian Firearms, Rome, 1997, p. 139.

展覽

Vienna, Sonderschau: Meister des Eisenschnittes, Vienna, 1941.
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. A 2238, from 1967.

拍品專文

Assembled and reworked in the third quarter of the nineteenth Century.

Comparable stock inlay is to be found on a wheel-lock rifle which belonged to Sigismund III Vasa (1556-1632; King of Poland 1587-1632; of Sweden 1592-1619) in the Hofjagd- und Leibrstkammer, Vienna (inv. no. D 68): the stock is signed by the unidentified stockmaker 'HL'.
Paolo Appiano is recorded in Milan between 1666 and 1673.