This ebony casket with moulded and bronze pearl-wreathed borders, incorporates black marble plaques displaying exotically plumed birds within ribbon-bands of golden Siena marble. While confronted parrots peck at cherry branches on the top, the pietra dura birds, inlaid on the front and sides, are perched on flowering branches. This Florentine box, executed in the Grand Ducal Workshops of Cosimo de Medici under the direction of Giovanni Battista Foggini (d. 1724), relates closely to another casket displaying pietra dura plaques, one of which features the Florentine lily amongst Roman acanthus-scrolls, as appears on the clock that was manufactured around 1715 to Foggini's design (A. González-Palacios, Il Tempio del Gusto, Milan, 1986, vol. II, p. 60, fig. 72, and p. 66, fig. 89). One of the same patterned plaques features on a third box, which combines both bird and floral plaques (ibid., p. 65, fig. 88)