Bargueño with mythological scenes

In the seventeenth century, small pieces of furniture such as this one, with numerous drawers to keep jewelry and other valuables were referred to as “desks”. These were luxury objects usually decorated with fine crafted inlaying techniques, consisting of the application or inlaying of costly material –such as ebony, tortoise shell and ivory– over a wood surface. Numerous samples of this work are preserved in Lima, which would indicate that many of them were produced in local workshops that attained high level of skills. Such would be the case of this piece, decorated with a series of mythological scenes. Engraved on small ivory plates they show a lineal and monochromatic treatment that evokes the images of woodcut prints. It is a fact that each plate resembles the illustrations that the German engraver Virgil Solis originally produced to illustrate an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (Germany, 1563), which was reprinted several times. These images reflect the familiarity of Viceregal society with classical culture, though reinterpreted in an allegorical note and Christianized within the medieval tradition of a moralized Oviedo. (RK)