A witness to Marie-Antoinette’s taste enters the Louvre

27/7/23 - Acquisition - Paris, Musée du Louvre - The highly mechanical precision of certain revolutionary inventories sometimes leaves considerable room for the imagination, and thus - until recently - we had to be content with dreaming when reading such a description: "a square base, formed of slabs of red and white Sicilian jasper, decorated at the four corners with grains of strings of onyx and ribboned sardony [. ...] on the other two sides are sphinxes, the whole carried on a plinth of yellow and white Sicilian jasper and mounted in mat gold ormolu of very fine workmanship". What could have been a dream came true a few weeks ago, when a fascinating object (ill. 1, 2 and 3) discreetly took its place in one of the most attractive display cases in the Louvre Objets d’art department, the one that houses the last vestiges of Queen Marie-Antoinette’s fabulous collection of hard stone vases. Far from the hysteria that so often surrounds all news items closely - or, more often, remotely - linked to the guillotined sovereign, this small miracle curiously did not benefit from excessive media hype, as this brilliant acquisition was confined to a brief article published at the beginning of June in Grande Galerie, le Journal du Louvre.