Set of Dinner Forks (14), from a Service Made for Pauline Bonaparte and Prince Camillo Borghese
Martin-Guillaume Biennais (French, 1764-1843; Pierre-Benoît Lorillon; French, 1757-1816; Paris, France; Pietro Paola Spagna; Italian, 1793-1861)
1789–1820
- Medium
- Gilded silver
- Classification
- Metalwork
- Dimensions
- H.: 21.1 cm (8 5/16 in.)
- Culture
- Paris
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Applied Arts of Europe
- Credit line
- Gift of Mrs. Charles V. Hickox
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
These dinner forks 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.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
