GENOA, THIRD QUARTER 18TH CENTURY

This side table, with its delicately carved legs with exaggerated hip and deep scrolls to top and bottom, joined by its flat stretcher and shallow pierced apron, is related to that in a drawing for an interior by Gregorio Petondi dated 1770 (A. González-Palacios, Il Mobile in Liguria, Genoa, 1996, fig. 198). Such a late date may be surprising, considering the advent of neo-classicism in France in the late 50s, but comparisons undertaken by González-Palacios to other furniture made in Genoa during these years seem to confirm that these consoles were made in the 1760s and 1770s. The Genoese nobility took a particular liking to these elaborate and almost nervous designs, for side tables of this type survive today in the Palazzo del Principe, Palazzo Rosso, Palazzo Spinola, Palazzo Doria and Palazzo Reale (E. Colle, Il Mobile Rococò in Italia, Milan, 2003, pp. 264 - 267). Tables of particularly closely related design, one from the Palazzo di Retorbido and another from a private collection, are illustrated in González-Palacios, op. cit, figs. 199 and 224, respectively.