THE TOP CIRCA 1800, THE BASE 19TH CENTURY

The white marble banqueting-table centrepiece is inlaid in trompe l'oiel marble with black and terracotta scagliola mosaics in the Etruscan Grecian fashion promoted by the antiquary baron d'Hancarville's, Catalogue of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1766-7 and by publications of Roman ceiling decoration such as P. S. Bartoli, Recueil de Peintures Antiques, Paris, 1783. Its ribbon-banded border features poetic laurels and pearl-strings, and tablets of wine-krater vases, which alternate with figurative tablets and medallions supported by festive vine-wreathed Bacchic leopards. The latter tablets feature reclining figures of Ceres and Neptune personifying the Elements of Earth and Water, and they are accompanied by medallions of figures proffering garlands or making sacrifices at an altar. Such centrepieces would harmonise with the fashion for Etruscan-decorated chimneypieces popularised in Ireland by architects such as James Wyatt (d.1813) and manufactured by the scagliola-inlayer Domenico Bartoli,who was working for Wyatt in the mid 1790s (D. Cameron, 'Scagliola inlay work: the problems of attribution', Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, vol. VII, 2004, pp. 140-155). The centrepiece has been adapted to form an early 19th century Grecian sofa-table with its 'brass' railed top supported on 'Apollo' lyre pilasters, whose palm-flowered plinths are raised on bronze-like Bacchic lion-paws.