The Tables of Ceasars and Cardinals

According to Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos, Marcus Vitruvius Mamurra was the first Roman ever to build himself a palace encrusted with marble and semi-precious stones (opus sectile); more than fifteen hundred years later, in the sixteenth century, other notables of the Eternal City, foremost among them scarlet-clad cardinals, decided to outdo the ancients in their lithic luxury by commissioning inlaid tables featuring alabaster, jasper, and gemstones. Just as the furnishings in a home bespeak the personality of their owner, the extraordinary tables of Roman and Florentine craftsmanship which Alvar González-Palacios presents in these pages convey the wicked twist of an era of lavish magnificence. These objects point to the codification of a new, virtuoso art of stonecutting, whose official advent occurred in 1588 with the inauguration of Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure, or Workshop of Semiprecious Stones.