Neo-Gothic scribe's office from the last third of the 19th century.

Neo-Gothic scriber's office from the last third of the 19th century.
Bronze with silver plating (later applied); Tin inkwell covers.
Hallmarks and numbering visible on the back of the legs.
Measurements: 20 × 44 × 20 cm.

This refined writing desk, conceived at the height of nineteenth-century historicism, responds to the neo-Gothic taste that permeated the European decorative arts during the second half of the nineteenth century, a legacy of architectural romanticism that rescued the forms of medieval Gothic as an emblem of nostalgia for the past.

The base of the bureau stands on a carefully cast trilobular arcade. On it rests a bronze filigree structure worked with virtuosity, where a vegetal tracery of Gothic inspiration (stylized rosettes, interlaced borders and openwork forms) is interwoven to give visual lightness to the whole. Two dragons guard the corners, genuinely gothic fantastic imagery. The inkwells are shaped like small Gothic chapels: each one presents delicate pinnacles, pointed arches and architectural details meticulously reproduced on a reduced scale. Closing the inkwells is an openwork arcade in the manner of a miniature cathedral façade, composed of three arches with colonnettes, ogee arches and an ornamental balance that demonstrates both knowledge of the Gothic vocabulary and a typically nineteenth-century decorative sensibility.