Pair of corbels Napoleon III; France, second half of the nineteenth century.

Pair of corbels Napoleon III; France, second half of the nineteenth century.
Gilded bronze with enameled porcelain applications.
Measurements. 22 x 27 x 10 cm (x2).
Pair of architectural base corbels made of gilded bronze with enameled porcelain plates. Both pieces have the same design, although they vary in terms of the representation of the details painted on the porcelain, one featuring a female portrait and the other a male one. This set of exquisitely crafted furniture was characteristic of the nineteenth century, in its historicist reinterpretation of the eighteenth-century and baroque legacy, an iconographic recovery related to the rise of exoticism at the time.
The combination of these apparently disparate elements is, however, effective at the expressive level, and manages to maintain the classical rigor while leaving room for the ornamental fantasy so much to the taste of the bourgeois clientele of the second half of the nineteenth century.