Letto piramidale

Mitchell Wolfson Jr. 2007 Genova - donazione

GX1993.194

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 296; Larghezza: 275; Profondità: 280

legno di rovere scolpito e intarsiato

Having become the owner of the Ducal Palace in Guastalla in 1896, the entrepreneur Flavio Mossina – already living in the Congo, where he began to develop his passion for exoticism – began a series of restoration works on the building, to make it his home and the headquarters of the "Trancerie Mossina" company, one of the first and most important plywood factories in Italy. Among the rooms he designed, mention must be made of the Egyptian Room, from which the furnishings preserved at the Wolfsoniana come, and whose decorative apparatus – commissioned from the Orientalist painter Fabio Fabbi, the probable author of the project perhaps together with his brother Alberto, – was executed around 1917 by the painter and architect Tommaso Aroldi, who trained between 1885 and 1892 at the academies of Parma and Florence, where he was a pupil of Giovanni Fattori.
The Nineveh dresser and pyramidal bed exemplarily document the visionary and imaginative Orientalist spirit that stamped the chamber's artistic features: a pastiche that combined exotic and historicist suggestions from different eras and geographic areas, as attested by the extravagant figurative inventions of the woodwork elements on deposit at the Wolfsoniana, depicting myths and legends of kings, pharaohs, gods and heroes, set in remote moors, from the Far East to Latin America, recreating a seductive and imaginative exotic atmosphere. The reference to ancient Egypt, evoked in the monumental pyramidal headboard of the bed, dialogued, in the context of this sumptuous Orientalist reconstruction, with the fantastic view in the front of the dresser of the city of Nineveh, an ancient urban center on the left bank of the Tigris in northern Mesopotamia.
The peculiar aspect of the Egyptian Room in the Ducal Palace of Guastalla, however, is represented above all by the fact that-although at the time it was very much in vogue to propose, alongside historicist furnishings, oriental-style lounges, generically referred to by the term "Moorish" and habitually equipped with a fumoir – this room was intended not for social sharing, but for a more intimate and family-like enjoyment.