The use of tortoiseshell dates back to ancient Greece when musical instruments such as the chelys or lyre were often made using an entire carapace. Veneers of tortoiseshell also became popular in Roman times for furniture.
Following Oriental custom in the Middle Ages tortoiseshell started being employed as a material to enrich the work upon ivory caskets. As the time passed, though, artisans became more experimental and started softening the material to make with it objects going from tables to vases, caskets, boxes and other assorted utensils.
Little by little, tortoiseshell started being considered as a material that could be incorporated into precious works. The material became particularly fashionable in the 17th century: Neapolitan craftsmen became well-known for creating unique pieces with it and the art reached its highest point in 17th and 18th centuries in France.
Artisans would inlay a mass of gold in the tortoiseshell to create figures, monuments and floral motifs. Then there was the "piqué" phase that consisted in inserting golden or silver pins into the shell to form patterns representing leaves, flowers and foliage. By altering the positions of the pins, light and shadow effects could also be created, and the master artisans could come up with intricate scenes, designs and arabesques. Combs and boxes were often decorated with these motifs and, during the 19th century, piqué was widely employed for small tortoiseshell jewelry.
An exhibition currently on at Galerie J. Kugel (25 Quai Anatole France) in Paris celebrates this little known art. "Piqué: Gold, Tortoiseshell and Mother-of-Pearl at the Court of Naples" (until 8th December 2018) features over 50 objects - from small ones such as snuffboxes, inkwells, platters, ewers, mirrors, vases, chess boards, walking-cane handles and cabinets to larger pieces.
The highlight of the exhibition is a table made between 1730 and 1740 by Neapolitan Giuseppe Sarao - the ultimate masterpiece made using this technique (on loan from the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg).
The pieces on display at the Kugel were created between 1720 and 1760 for connoisseurs and the court, and in particular for Charles of Bourbon, the younger son of Philip V of Spain who, in 1734, became king of Naples. Here the artisans working with tortoiseshell were called "tartarugari".
Tortoiseshell was used for veneering on cabinets and other objects already in the mid-17th century in Naples, a city that had also refined the art of mother-of-pearl marquetry on tortoiseshell. But it was the unprecedented combination of gold, tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl that took the art to a new level (in France André Charles Boulle, cabinetmaker to Louis XIV perfected this art).
The talented "tartarugari" would join and mould the tortoiseshell using boiling water and olive oil, and inlay gold and mother-of-pearl into the still-soft tortoiseshell. In this way they created the most extravagant shapes, which they adorned with "piqué" decors such as singeries (scenes where monkeys engage in human activities), chinoiseries, humorous and grotesque stories and architectural scenes.
This art was considered as a virtuoso skill and Sarao became the most famous tartarugaro, owning a workshop located next to the royal palace. The table is not the only piece made by him included in the exhibition, but it remains the most iconic as it featured an inventive and elaborate top decorated with over a hundred chinoiserie figures, plus animals, insects, birds and dragons.
Six main medallions depict Chinese couples in gold and mother-of-pearl, while the compartments are decorated with small Chinese figures made of cut out and engraved gold.
The centre is adorned with a small cartouche in which two Chinamen rock back and forth on a seesaw and the four gold vases around them symbolise the seasons.
Underneath the medallion with the Chinese couple there is the monogramme "GS FN", which stands for "Giuseppe Sarao Fecit Napoli" (Sarao made it in Naples; interestingly enough also his son, Gennaro, had the same initials, but the two can be distinguished from their style).
The court of Charles of Bourbon was among the most splendid and cosmopolitan in all of Europe. During his reign Charles brought to Naples craftspeople from different places, founding the porcelain factory of Capodimonte and installing workers from Dresden there. The king also invited Florentine weavers and opened studios for the making of furniture, gold- and silver-smiths work and hardstone carving.
When he became King of Spain, Charles took his craftspeople with him, weakening the arts in Naples, but the piqué workers remained and went on creating unique pieces till tastes changed in the 18th century.
The work of the tartarugari was eventually rediscovered by collectors during the Second Empire and interest in this art returned again in the 19th century (among the collectors of these pieces there were several members of the Rothschild family), but the main point of the exhibition at Galerie Kugel is to highlight how there was the same level of craft in all the pieces on display, from the smallest to the largest (compare Sarao's table and the cutlery handles by craftsman Tomaso Tagliaferro and you will easily spot the same technical skills).
The pieces in this exhibit are extremely unique as piqué is now a lost art and craft: the trade of tortoiseshell worldwide was banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 1973, and the material is often recreated in stained horn, cellulose acetate and other plastic based materials and synthetic substitutes such as Tortoloid and Tor-tis. Yet studying the technique and the details in the pieces in this exhibition may help a younger generation of creatives to come up with other innovative decorative processes. The event "Piqué" seems to be also on trend with the current interest in genuine craftsmanship and in exhibitions rediscovering artisanal techniques.
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