Lot Essay
For two other fine hardstone boxes from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, see Charles Truman, The Gilbert Collection of Gold Boxes, Los Angeles, 1991, no. 141 and 142, pp. 408-411. Another pietra dura snuff-box, also inlaid with trophies of Music, is illustrated in A. Kenneth Snowman, Eighteenth-Century Gold Boxes of Europe, London, 1966, colour plates 724-725, and described by Sacheverell Sitwell (in Snowman, op. cit., p. 144): "Boxes of this sort must be the work of a single craftsman, or perhaps a father and son, and even at this high pitch of workmanship they may have been produced in fair quantity, but no doubt with other miscellaneous objects in the same painstaking technique."