*LARGE AND EXCEPTIONAL MIDDLE TABLE WITH SIX ATLATLS SUPPORTING... Lot 4

*LARGE AND EXCEPTIONAL MIDDLE TABLE WITH SIX ATLATLS SUPPORTING A GREEN JASPER VENEERED TOP Probably French work, from the Empire period GILDED WOOD AND GREEN JASPER H. 96 cm W. 233 cm D. 117 cm Dim. of the tray : 223 x 111 cm Restorations on the edge of the tray and missing two plates of 13 cm and 5 cm. The huge green jasper tray is made of several assembled plates. assembled. These plates have a central scalloped decoration and the four angles are also curved. The six standing telamons turn their backs and support a huge immense terrace on their shoulders, the hands posed on the hips. hips. They are dressed with a piece of cloth tied on each hip hip resembling the perizonium. They wear on each wrist a bracelet of strength and dodge a step with their right foot as if to find the balance. The Atlanteans are barefoot on a curbstone joined by a sinuous sinuous strut bordered by a frieze of pearls in a molding. Between each figure, a modillion with a lion's head. The entablature, lined with a finely carved wooden string, is The entablature is lined with a finely carved wooden string and decorated with a frieze of water leaves. The edge of the top is decorated with a fine twisted ribbon in gilded brass. The theatrical effect of this extraordinary piece of furniture is found in the realism of the atlantes and the treatment of the entablature which seems a considerable mass. The vogue for richly sculpted furniture with animal or character bases or characters persisted in Rome in the XVIIIth century. Thus, the Villa Borghese will welcome in its galleries immense tables richly sculpted with figures when the layout was modified in the of the furnishings in the 1770s. Among this fashionable furniture, we must mention the two middle tables of the Vatican Apostolic Library, supported by eight bronze hercules in bronze (Fig.1) after a drawing dated 1786/1787 by Giuseppe Valadier Giuseppe Valadier (1762-1839). The representation of Atlantes in French art and furniture is well known. (The giant Atlas was condemned to carry the world on his shoulders his shoulders, in this case his neck). Their use is not specific to Italian art, despite the excellence of the Valadiers in Rome of the Valadiers in Rome and their masterpieces. The Louvre preserves the Roman marble sculpture of the four "satires in Atlantean", very close to the table we are presenting (Fig. 2). table we are presenting (Fig. 2). This work, dating from the second century A.D., was part of the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692-1779) and was brought back to France by Napoleon's confiscation in 1803. of the Louvre Museum, inventory no. MA 587, Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Denon wing, room 405). In the 18th century, Pierre Lartigue (1745-1826), an engineer hydrographer and excellent draughtsman (he was an engineer at the of maps and plans of the Navy), drew the terrestrial and celestial terrestrial and celestial globes carried by an atlantean which were executed with Louis Pierre Florimont Lennel (1740-1784) in 1777 and 1777 and offered on July 6, 1778 to King Louis XVI. They will be placed in his library at Versailles where they remained until 1793. 1793 (Fig. 3) The designer of this extraordinary table wanted to give it a "Roman origin" by the presence of lion protuberances on the on the base. References: - The atlatls, a model frequently represented in the eighteenth and 19th centuries, and forming the base of the console, are identical to the three atlantes in gilded bronze supporting the porphyry cup adorning the replica of the fountain of the Villa Albani in Rome designed by Luigi Luigi Valadier (1726-1785), which was the first table setting created for for Jacques-Laure Le Tonnelier (1723-1785), bailli de Breteuil, ambassador of the of the Knights of Malta to the Holy See from 1758 and, at the French court of France from 1778. He resold this especially, today dispersed between Madrid and Saint Petersburg, to Catherine II of Russia. The replica of the replica of the fountain is today among the elements kept in the museum of the the Hermitage. - The two globes, celestial and terrestrial, made by Lartigue with Lennel in the king's apartments at Versailles (inventory numbers V 5261 and and V 5080). Offered to Louis XVI in 1778 and placed in his library at Versailles, they were Versailles, excluded from the revolutionary sales, they were sent to the Ministry of the of the Navy in 1796, at the request of Admiral de Rosily, director of the Dépôt des cartes de la Marine. (Fig 3) - Four atlantes, balcony supports in the Tyszkiewic Palace in Warsaw, (Poland). They were sculpted in 1787 by André Jean Le Brun (1737-1811), first sculptor of king Stanislas Auguste Poniatowski. He