A Homeric Hymn dated to the 7th century BC narrates: “A tortoise he found, and won endless and industrious delight, for it was Hermes that first drew music from it.” The messenger of the gods would in fact have obtained from the precious shell his lyre. In Rome, at the time of Caesar, tortoiseshell was used to cover and embellish furniture together with ivory, silver and other precious materials.

The origin of the piqué tortoiseshell technique, however, is uncertain; it is said that it originated in Naples at the end of the 16th century and was developed and perfected by the jeweler Laurentini in the middle of the 17th century. Its popularity spread immediately throughout northern Europe, but Naples continued to be the main center for this technique throughout the 18th century. Under the reign of Charles of Bourbon and his wife Amalia of Saxony, enlightened and passionate patrons of the arts, the most famous workshops were those of Giuseppe and Gennaro Sarao, Nicolas De Turris and Antonio Laurentis, appointed court goldsmith in 1747 and possibly a direct descendant of the aforementioned Laurentini.

The piqué technique consists of heating the tortoiseshell with boiling water and olive oil to soften it and to encrust it with gold, mother-of-pearl and other precious material inserts. The tortoiseshell, cooling down and hardening, retains the inserts without the use of glue. This difficult art has been minutely described for the first time in the Encyclopedias of Diderot and d'Alembert (Piquer de tabatiers, incrusteurs et brodeurs) and four different procedures are mentioned:

• piqué point-d'or, in which tiny holes are created that are then filled with molten gold or silver;
• piqué coulé, in which the same molten metals are poured into thin linear incisions;
• piqué incrusté, in which decorations in mother-of-pearl and gold are inserted into the heated tortoiseshell;
• piqué brodé or posé, which combines all three of the above techniques together.

Piqué tortoiseshell objects, appreciated in all the European courts, attracted great interest among the Grand Tour travelers and among the great art collectors during the 19th and 20th centuries, in particular the Rothschilds.

One of the greatest examples of the skill of Neapolitan artisans, the so-called tartarugari, is a table created by Giuseppe Sarao around 1730, decorated with chinoiserie and crowded with more than a hundred figures, animals, insects, dragons and birds. Of the six medallions on the top, one bears the artists’ signature, "Sfn": "Sarao fecit Napoli". Baron Stieglitz purchased the table in 1886 and since 1933 it has been part of the Hermitage collections.

The consistently high interest from collectors for these eccentric masterpieces was recently celebrated by an exhibition held in Paris, which is the first in-depth study of this technique, with the evocative title Complètement
Piqué: Gold, Tortoiseshell and Mother-of-Pearl at the court of Naples”.

The scent-bottle chest that will be offered in our Furniture, Paintings and Works of Art auction on 2 April is a splendid example of the skill of the Neapolitan tartarugari of the mideighteenth century and is attributable to the workshop of Giuseppe and Gennaro Sarao. Rectangular, it is mounted with gilded bronzes of a later period with lid and sides with mother-of-pearl and rose gold inlays, depicting mythological scenes and cherubs between scrollwork and ribbons, and contains eight crystal bottles with gilded metal caps. 

(di Umberta Boetti Villanis)