Spectacular and very rare to find outside of a museum, this will remind you of its larger cousins, the curiosity cabinets with many drawers for a collector's displays. Those run very high in price, and are so rarely at market. So we're particularly thrilled to offer mine. This large chest one is that same period, 17th century to earliest 18th century Italian specimen cabinet, in tabletop chest style. It is large at 24.5" x 15.5" and with the top compartment closed, 11.5" tall. Raised on large original carved bun feet, trimmed beautifully and inlaid with Renaissance revival figural decoration. Trimmed with accented veneers of tortoise shell, inlays of ivory, the cabinet does meet the rules of less than 5% ivory decoration on a furniture item and is therefore available to sell worldwide without CITES. It's heavy! We can ship domestically in a lamp box, sized smaller in length.
Good to very good for age and type, these 17th to earliest 18th century curiosity cabinets are so rare to find. The cabinet is 24.5" x 15.5" and 11.5" tall, It weighs 40 lbs for shipment. We were able to find a key which fits perfectly and will lock the large drawer, too, from among our life-long collection of antique keys - lucky! A stunning and rare find. It shows some age, has a few ancient woodworm holes but nothing pithy anywhere and no active infestation for probably at least a century. We did not dot with ebony, which will make them less visible, since we do want you to be fully able to see any/all small flaws of the centuries. No big losses, some age lines in the beautiful old wood grains. The inlays are complete, firmly in place, incised and probably could use a re-lac to the recesses to make the figures show even better.
