Center table Louis XV style; France, late nineteenth century.

Center table Louis XV style; France, late nineteenth century.
Gilded bronze.
Measurements; 13 x 37,5 x 23,5 cm.
Centerpiece of oval profile and symmetrical composition, made of richly chiseled and gilded bronze, which faithfully retakes the ornamental vocabulary of the Louis XV style. The piece rises on four legs of pronounced curvature, articulated by means of scrolls and acanthus leaves, which support an openwork body with wide vertical openings framed by an exuberant vegetal decoration. The formal repertoire, rockeries, scrolls, fleshy foliage and undulating surfaces, refers directly to the style developed in France during the reign of Louis XV. That language, characterized by asymmetry, continuous movement and organic integration between structure and ornament, found in the bronze arts one of its most refined fields of expression.
The present work must be placed in the historicist context of the Second French Empire. During the reign of Napoleon III, the taste for the styles of the past, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Renaissance or Baroque, experienced a systematic revival. This phenomenon responded both to the desire to legitimize the regime by evoking French historical grandeur and to the demand of a wealthy bourgeoisie that aspired to reproduce the aristocratic splendor of the Ancien Régime in their urban residences.