Set of Dessert Knives (10), from a Service Made for Pauline Bonaparte and Prince Camillo Borghese
Martin-Guillaume Biennais
1789–1820
- Medium
- Gilded silver and steel blades
- Dimensions
- H.: 20.6 cm (8 1/8 in.)
- Genre
- silver
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
metalworkBorghese Serviceeuropean decorative artssilverinorganic materialnonferrous metalsilver giltmetal
About
These knives are part of a vast service made for Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline on the occasion of her marriage to the Roman nobleman Camillo Borghese, Sixth Prince of Sulmona. In the years after the French Revolution, architects and designers adopted the visual language of ancient Greece and Rome to express the new imperial order. Napoleon, hoping to promote Paris’s luxury trades, commissioned several silver dinner services as gifts to be sent abroad.
