A GERMAN BAROQUE REPOUSSÉ AND ENGRAVED BRASS CENTER TABLE PROBABLY BERLIN, SECOND HALF 17TH CENTURY

underside stamped with a coronet over SCA.

Adolfo Loewi, Venice.

The design of the present table is informed by contemporaneous silver-mounted furniture commissioned by the wealthiest members of the aristocracy and royalty throughout Europe. Although the most famous examples of silver and silver-mounted furnishings are those ordered by Louis XIV for Versailles, the epicenter of silvered furniture making in the seventeenth century was Germany. Augsburg, with its long and illustrious history in the craft, was the main center of silversmithing and some of its most renowned artists including Sebastian Mylius and members of the Drentwett and Biller dynasties supplied silver furniture to the courts of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such piece is a the throne of Queen Christina of Sweden from 1650 by Abraham Dretwett, see Heinrich Kreisel, Die Kunst des deutschen Möbels, vol. I, Munich, 1970, fig. 618. Occasionally, less costly metals were used to emulate such luxurious objects. The table offered here is the product of such adaptation and was most likely intended for the residence of a lesser noble or wealthy patrician. With its simple curving legs and cross stretcher, the overall form follows mid and late seventeenth-century prototypes, most specifically those from Berlin. For comparable German Baroque tables worked in wood, see Hermann Schmitz, Deutsche Möbel des Barock und Rokoko, Stuttgart, 1923, pp. 71 and 85 and Kreisel, op. cit., p. fig. 10. Certain specific design elements, such as the lambrequin border, shows the influence of Jean Bérain the Elder and help to date this table to the second half of the seventeenth century. For a table with similar lambrequin decoration at Schloss Charlottenburg, see ibid., fig. 2.