Lot 1029 Dα

One of the earliest rooms designed in this style can be found in the Palazzo Grosso in Riva presso Chieri, south of Turin. The palace came into the hands of the young Countess Faustina Grosso in Mazzetti di Montalero in 1778, and she organised for extensive renovations of the interior to be carried out by the brothers Antonio and Giovanni Torricelli. Amendments were also planned for the palace facade and two new gardens were designed by the Viennese architect Leopoldo Pollack, but these designs were never carried out. What remains of the ambitious renovation project is a magnificent room decorated in micro-mosaic and scagliola panels depicting various more or less arbitrarily chosen motifs drawn from the archaeological excavations at Naples. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, the findings of which were published in Dominique-Vivant Denon's three-volume "Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypt" (London 1802), provided a new focus of interest and longing for lovers of the ancient world. The first excavations in Mesopotamia followed shortly after in 1811, begun by the British archaeologist Claudius James Rich, who published his findings in London in 1836. Much of the inspiration for these relief panels derives from these and subsequent publications, although the depictions make no claim on historical accuracy. They are designed more to evoke a feeling for and testify to an affinity with the past.