By tradition, collection of the Demidoff, family, Athens, possibly for Elim Demi🧔doff, 3rd prince of San Donato;

Embricos family collection in the 1950s;

Private collection in the 1960s;

Christie's London, 5 July 2007, lot 220.

These very rare vases, of which only two other pairs are known, one of which is in the Getty Museum, are an iconic example of the great tradition of 18th-century French mounted vases. The particularly creative gilt-bronze mounts, inspired by a design by the French ornemaniste Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot, adorn a magnificent porphyry vase, a symbol of power in reference to ancient Rome.

Noble materials: porphyry and gilt-bronze

This pair of mounted vases reflects the eve𒉰r-renewed appeal in France of Egyptian porphyry, a material that symbolized wealth, power and luxury, the extraction of which ceased during Antiquity but with the use from the Renaissance onwards made possible mainly by salvaging the material from monuments, ruins and, above all, columns in Ancieᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚnt Rome.

During the reign of Louis XIV, porphyry aroused great interest among collectors such as Richelieu, Mazarin and, of course, the King himself. Lou👍is XIV's immense porphyry collection at Versailles was largely acquired in Rome, where throughout the 17th century many objects in antique porphyry were reworked or create꧑d directly from rediscovered columns. His collection was unrivalled in its richness and diversity, and consisted mainly of various monumental vases.

Towards the middle of the 18th century, large 17th-century porphyry vases were adorned with fashionable Louis XV gilt-bronze mou💃nts. One of the earliest examples of porphyry and gilt bronze is the splendid gadrooned vase in the collection of the Marquis de Marigny, which was subsequently acquired for the Crown in 1779. This was a technically complicated undertaking, but it was also risky and very costly, so the decorative boom in the second half of the 18th century focused on piecework. The new infatuation with Antiquity logically brought porphyry - or other rare stones - back into fashion. Blocks of porphyry were specifically shaped into smooth, unadorned classical forms, which were then mounted in gillt-bronze to give the object an even greater appeal. Our vases are superb examples of this period, when the precious porphyry core was used as the body for impressive gilded and chased bronze mounts.

All the great collectors and cabinets of connoisseurs were bound to possess hard stone objects, including the Duc d'Aumont (1709-1782). Porphyry had a special place among the various specimens he had collected. The sale of his collection from 12 December 1782 featured a large number of these vases, most of them mounted with gilt-bronze. The stones were sought after in Italy and even further afield, and some were cut and polished in the workshop that the Duke created in the Hôtel des Menus Plaisir du Roi on the Faubou🤡rg Poissonnière. Some of these porphyry vases were now also made using French porphyry mined near Belfort in Lorraine, where in 1768 a vein was discovered on land belonging to th൲e Duc d'Aumont's niece, the Duchesse de Mazarin.

Once the precious material was identified and the te﷽chnique for associating it with a gilt-bronze mount was mastered, our vases would have started out with a central core of porphyry, probably antique, cut and moulded to fit the exuberant mounts depicting lions, drapery and snakes. A great deal of preparatoღry work was required, the result of collaboration between an ornamentalist and a marchand-mercier, who was able to control the creative imaginations and make the connection with the craftsmen who made them.

Petitot, architect at the court of Parma

The bold, uncompromising neoclassical design belongs to the famous series of drawings by Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801), Suite de Vases published by Benigo Bossi (1727-1792) in Parma in 1764. These drawings were probably available in Paris some time later, and it is interesting to note that the bronze-maker, Jean-Claude Duplessis owned engravings by Petitot in 1774 (J. Whitehead, Mobilier et arts décoratifs en France au XVIIIe siècle, 1992, p. 65) and that the Suite de Vases series had already been sold at auction in Paris in 1775 (G. Cirillo, Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot, Parma, 2002, p. 124).

Petitot trained in Lyon, Paris and Rome, and became court architect at Parma in 1753 through the famous amateur Anne-Claude-Philippe, comte de Caylus (1692-1765). Parma was one of the most Francophile courts in Europe, where the eldest daughter of Louis XV, Madame Louise-Elisabeth, Madame Infante, reigned from 1748 until her death in 1759, along with her Spanish cousin, Philippe de Bourbon whom she had married in 1739. Cultural and commercial exchanges between Paris and Parma were naturally important, and many significant purchases of furniture and bronze furnishings were made for the Parma court, largely through their agents in Paris, Claude Bonnet, Jean-Gaspard Testard and Francisco de Llovera (A. González-Palacios, Patrimoine artistique du Quirinal, Gli Arredi Francesi, Milan, 1995).

Petitot's handwritten reference to the Duke of Parma in the opening pages of his Suite de Vases indicates that the first three plates depict vases placed in the Duke's garden in Parma. This suggests that the engravings, or at least some of them, were based on items that actually existed in the Duke's collection rather than on designs. This seems to be confirmed by Bossi's dedication on the following page ‘Monsieur, La Permission que vous aves donne m'engver cette suite de Vases dont les Originaux appartiennent vous’. Plate 10 of Petitot's Suite de Vases, the design for our vases, was perhaps one of his most prized, as it was soon incorporated into a design for a table centerpiece executed by the Turin court goldsmith Giovani Battista Boucheron (1742-1815) in 1776. No trace exists of this highly ambitious project, and it is not known whether it was ever realized. The ensemble demonstrates its grandeur and scope. It was perhaps an entirely new project, unless it incorporated earlier works of art from the royal collections. In other words, Boucheron may have seen this model or based his design on Plate 10 by Petitot (M. Chapman, ‘A diplomative gift from Turin’, Apollo, January 1998, p. 8 and G. Beretti, et al, Gli Splendori del Bronzo, Turin, 2003, nos. 26-27).).

The enduring success of Pe♌titot's series from 1764 until the early nineteent💞h century is also supported by a Florentine scagliola tabletop executed by Carlo Paoletto in 1808. James Methuen-Campbell has pointed out that this tray, set in a table at Corsham Court, Wiltshire, represents many vases from the Suite de Vases, including a variant of Plate 10 but also other examples such as Plate 7, a slender vase with grasshopper handles. The various vases form a composition, on a tabletop with a sphinx, coral and shells.

A testimony to the classical revival

Splendid in both the richness and boldness of their design, combining two confronting lions clutching drapery around a porphyry vase where the pedestal is partially concealed by a snake around which it has twisted, these superb vases mo🐈unted in gilt-bronze reflect the skill of a craftsman who was able to bring Petitot's project to fruition. The characteristics of gilt bronze art in France in the second half of the 18th century can be seen in the casting, assembly techniques, chasing and mercury gilding.

In addition to this pair, two other pairs are also known from the eighteenth century, a pair from the collections of the Marquis of Chomondeley, ‘Works of Art from Houghton’, Christie's sale, London, 8 December 1994, lot 56, dated circa 1765, and a pair now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, illustrated in G. Wilson, ‘Acquisitions made by the Department of Decorative Arts in 1983’, The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, 1984, no. 9, p. 201, said📖 to be contemporary with ours, circa 1780-1785.

The Demidoff provenance

When the previous owner of these vases boug🐟ht them in Greece in the 1950s, a Demidoff provenance was given, but no documentary confirmation h൩as yet been found.

The quality of the vases is entirely in keeping with the Demidoff collecting tastes, as evidenꦇced by the splendid works of art in th🍨eir collections. They were acquired from a member of the Demidoff family in Greece, possibly Elim Demidoff, 3rd Prince of San Donato (1868-1943), Russian Ambassador to Greece in 1912-1917, but more likely from his widow Sophie (1870-1953). Elim's great-grandfather, Count Nicolas Demidoff (1773-1828), amassed an enormous fortune from mining and built up a superb collection of paintings, silverware, furniture and works of art in his Paris residences and at the Villa San Donato near Florence.

When Nicolas Demidoff died in 1828, his collection passed to his sons Paul (born 1798) and Anatole (born 1813). The latter inherited the Italian estates and was given the title of Prince of San Donato. His sales in Paris in 18✨68 and 1870, and in Florence in 1880, are among the most important sales of the nineteenth century in which these vases did not appear. It is likely that if they belonged to Paul Demidoff's collection, these vases were passed on to his son, also named Paul, 2nd Prince of San Donato (who died in 1885), and then on his death to his children, Elim, Aurore and Nikita.