Cassolette (2) - Bronze, Marble - Pair of overturned candlestick holders

Pair of cassolettes with an inverted candlestick tripod in white statuary marble and gilded bronze, Louis XVI style.

This pair of cassolettes, 25 cm high and 10 cm in diameter, consists of an ovoid body in white statuary marble, topped by a domed marble lid, finished with a pear-shaped finial in gilded bronze pierced with foliage. The body rests in a finely pierced gilded bronze mount, circled by a frieze of pearls, to which are attached three slender, fluted uprights with twisted channels, gathered at the top by stylized acanthus leaves from which delicate linked chains hang, purely decorative, that ornament the marble girth. These uprights terminate in a paw-like foot, a motif borrowed from the antique animal repertoire highly prized by neoclassicism, and rest on a circular stepped base in bronze and white marble, edged with a gilded torsade. The lid, removable, folds back to form a candlestick, which could also accommodate a tablet or scented disc.

This type of object, known as a tripode cassolette or sometimes Athénienne due to its silhouette inspired by the sacrificial tripods of ancient Greek and Roman antiquity, belongs to the neoclassical ornamental vocabulary disseminated in France from the 1760s–1770s, under the influence of Greek taste and then the Louis XVI style proper. The form directly draws from the antique tripods rediscovered during the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, reworked by Parisian bronziers into a refined decorative object, combining statuary marble and chased gilded bronze in mercury-like finish.

Functionally, the cassolettes were used to burn or diffuse perfumes, aromatic tablets, or essences, a practice widespread in eighteenth-century aristocratic interiors to purify the air and perfume salons; the reversible lid, transformable into a small dish for a candle or perfume, attests to this dual mode of use.

Although the form, the tripod with animal-heads and paw feet, and the pairing of white marble with gilded bronze are stylistically Louis XVI, this production enjoyed immense revival throughout the nineteenth century, notably under the Second Empire, when Parisian bronziers repeatedly reissued these neoclassical models for a bourgeois clientele nostalgic for the refinement of the Ancien Régime.

Several cracks on both lids, with two chips on one of the two.