Show me:
and
Clear all filters

  • 35 items
  • 25 items Explore
  • 89 items
  • 1 items
  • 3,438 items Explore
  • 97 items Explore
  • 280 items
  • 4 items
  • 220 items
  • 13,229 items Explore
  • 209 items Explore
  • 1,225 items Explore
  • 8,732 items Explore
  • 5,089 items Explore
  • 9 items Explore
  • 165 items Explore
  • 13,005 items Explore
  • 13,621 items Explore
  • 4,810 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 5 items
  • 149 items Explore
  • 2,007 items Explore
  • 4,759 items Explore
  • 15 items Explore
  • 422 items Explore
  • 252 items
  • 100 items Explore
  • 19,971 items Explore
  • 34 items Explore
  • 1,924 items Explore
  • 1,083 items Explore
  • 5 items
  • 2,072 items Explore
  • 2 items
  • 456 items Explore
  • 917 items Explore
  • 1 items Explore
  • 5 items
  • 7 items
  • 20,263 items Explore
  • 800 items Explore
  • 19 items
  • 73 items Explore
  • 33 items
  • 793 items
  • 20 items
  • 4 items
  • 26 items
  • 61 items
  • 28 items
  • 319 items Explore
  • 6 items
  • 44 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 2 items
  • 2 items
  • 7 items
  • 121 items Explore
  • 119 items
  • 1 items
  • 976 items Explore
  • 812 items
  • 95 items
  • 27 items
  • 107 items
  • 37,280 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 3,871 items Explore
  • 1,530 items Explore
  • 403 items
  • 125 items Explore
  • 10,413 items Explore
  • 9,684 items Explore
  • 4 items
  • 1 items
  • 38 items
  • 3 items
  • 4 items
  • 6,778 items Explore
  • 7,359 items Explore
  • 4,583 items Explore
  • 1,893 items Explore
  • 1,194 items Explore
  • 22,724 items Explore
  • 3,663 items Explore
  • 17 items
  • 5 items
  • 334 items
  • 1 items
  • 1 items
  • 3,350 items Explore
  • 23 items Explore
  • 352 items Explore
  • 796 items Explore
  • 1,093 items Explore
  • 514 items Explore
  • 1,146 items Explore
  • 89 items
  • 125 items Explore
  • 6,955 items Explore
  • 76 items
  • 310 items
  • 4 items
  • 2 items
  • 63 items
  • 2 items
  • 2,909 items Explore
  • 1,582 items Explore
  • 203 items
  • 90 items
  • 22,137 items Explore
  • 1,322 items Explore
  • 138 items
  • 847 items Explore
  • 32 items
  • 1 items
  • 132 items Explore
  • 40 items
  • 20 items
  • 281 items
  • 313 items
  • 685 items Explore
  • 346 items Explore
  • 2,429 items
  • 2,545 items
  • 3 items
  • 1 items
  • 1 items
  • 4,394 items Explore
  • 40,347 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 3,293 items Explore
  • 275 items Explore
  • 8,702 items Explore
  • 31 items
  • 25 items
  • 304 items Explore
  • 777 items Explore
  • 3 items
  • 65 items
  • 161 items
  • 50 items
  • 52 items
  • 23,234 items Explore
  • 917 items
  • 66 items
  • 22,636 items Explore
  • 2 items
  • 2,337 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 1,028 items Explore
  • 4 items
  • 759 items
  • 499 items
  • 4 items
  • 3,309 items Explore
  • 179 items
  • 59 items
  • 454 items Explore
  • 3 items
  • 21 items
  • 90 items Explore
  • 76 items
  • 281 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 6 items
  • 128 items
  • 295 items
  • 447 items
  • 284 items
  • 1 items
  • 906 items Explore
  • 271 items Explore
  • 11,294 items Explore
  • 755 items Explore
  • 6,035 items Explore
  • 2 items
  • 8,298 items Explore
  • 27 items
  • 1 items
  • 5,970 items Explore
  • 4 items
  • 3,725 items Explore
  • 9,182 items Explore
  • 7,884 items Explore
  • 185 items
  • 19 items
  • 144 items
  • 7 items
  • 853 items Explore
  • 19 items
  • 8 items
  • 1,096 items Explore
  • 269 items
  • 1 items
  • 2,056 items
  • 3,522 items Explore
  • 695 items Explore
  • 18 items
  • 134 items
  • 6,743 items Explore
  • 93 items
  • 18,934 items Explore
  • 3,136 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 1 items
  • 7 items
  • 10,982 items Explore
  • 37 items
  • 2 items
  • 21,540 items Explore
  • 38 items
  • 13,281 items Explore
  • 3,461 items Explore
  • 5,688 items Explore
  • 33 items
  • 49,871 items Explore
  • 646 items Explore
  • 417 items
  • 26,703 items Explore
  • 216 items
  • 3 items
  • 6 items
  • 1 items
  • 35 items
  • 27 items
  • 438 items Explore
  • 636 items
  • 204 items Explore
  • 13 items
  • 13,667 items Explore
  • 1,360 items Explore
  • 3 items
  • 10,260 items
  • 9 items
  • 10 items
  • 14 items
  • 25 items
  • 1 items
  • 4,523 items Explore
  • 912 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 1 items
  • 314 items
  • 597 items Explore
  • 42 items
  • 4 items
  • 2,286 items Explore
  • 1,662 items Explore
  • 15 items
  • 1,876 items Explore
  • 150 items
  • 81 items
  • 766 items Explore
  • 3,084 items Explore
  • 44 items
  • 17 items
  • 12 items
  • 10,670 items Explore
  • 23,416 items Explore
  • 3 items
  • 1 items
  • 41 items
  • 1,374 items
  • 179 items Explore
  • 8 items
  • 84 items
  • 1 items
  • 13,570 items Explore
  • 3,582 items Explore
  • 2,904 items Explore
  • 4,798 items Explore
  • 22 items
  • 42 items
  • 6,910 items Explore
  • 4,841 items Explore
  • 256 items Explore
  • 2,300 items Explore
  • 2,975 items Explore
  • 2 items
  • 1,897 items Explore
  • 193 items
  • 223 items Explore
  • 466 items Explore
  • 6,118 items Explore
  • 8,729 items Explore
  • 1,860 items Explore
  • 3 items
  • 1 items
  • 5,933 items Explore
  • 3,354 items Explore
  • 11,133 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 84 items
  • 11 items
  • 2,503 items Explore
  • 7 items
  • 24 items
  • 51 items
  • 6 items
  • 1 items
  • 4,257 items Explore
  • 611 items Explore
  • 70 items
  • 17 items
  • 154 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 95 items Explore
  • 460 items
  • 4 items
  • 996 items Explore
  • 3,553 items Explore
  • 4 items
  • 5 items
  • 9,494 items Explore
  • 48 items Explore
  • 3 items
  • 7 items
  • 42 items
  • 3 items
  • 13,789 items Explore
  • 1,162 items Explore
  • 92 items
  • 10,561 items Explore
  • 1,920 items
  • 18 items
  • 7,856 items Explore
  • 21 items
  • 12,950 items Explore
  • 1,418 items Explore
  • 8 items
  • 6,169 items Explore
  • 14,874 items Explore
  • 4 items
  • 1,667 items Explore
  • 181 items Explore
  • 4 items
  • 15 items
  • 5,686 items Explore
  • 12,284 items Explore
  • 48 items
  • 25 items
  • 2 items
  • 3 items
  • 7,215 items Explore
  • 357 items Explore
  • 13 items
  • 4 items
  • 6 items
  • 103 items Explore
  • 7 items
  • 5 items
  • 485 items
  • 666 items Explore
  • 8,372 items Explore
  • 75 items
  • 7,347 items Explore
  • 5 items
  • 26 items
  • 4,606 items Explore
  • 428 items
  • 339 items Explore
  • 12,703 items Explore
  • 55 items
  • 20 items
  • 7 items
  • 4 items
  • 325 items Explore
  • 427 items
  • 458 items
  • 3,704 items Explore
  • 27 items
  • 1,238 items Explore
  • 2,503 items Explore
  • 733 items Explore
  • 36 items
  • 1,136 items Explore
  • 97 items Explore
  • 24 items
  • 228 items Explore
  • 79,972 items Explore
  • 3,135 items Explore
  • 2,875 items Explore
  • 25 items
  • 5,345 items Explore
  • 1,831 items Explore
  • 4 items
  • 17,514 items Explore
  • 4,930 items Explore
  • 1 items
  • 7 items
  • 631 items Explore
  • 85 items
  • 31 items
  • 1 items
  • 76 items
  • 29 items
  • 86 items
  • 3 items
  • 1,176 items Explore
  • 109 items
  • 805 items
  • 12,447 items Explore
  • 27 items
  • 13 items
  • 1,710 items Explore
  • 214 items
  • 17,037 items Explore
  • 85 items
  • 17 items
  • 1 items
  • 8 items
  • 324 items
  • 2 items
  • 626 items Explore
  • 1,597 items Explore
  • 8 items
  • 1,130 items Explore
  • 375 items
  • 2 items
  • 326 items

Select a time period

Or choose a specific year

Clear all filters

The Pope's Cabinet

Unknown

Category

Furniture

Date

circa 1585 (the cabinet) - circa 1742 (the stand)

Materials

The cabinet: Ebony, gilt bronze and pietre dure, including: agate (banded, black and white, brown, grey, grey and white, moss, orange, pink, pink mottled), alabaster (Egyptian, fiorito, green, green Algerian, di Palombara, a pecorella, a tartaruga, white), amethyst (tinted with hematite), aventurine, bianco e nero antico, bloodstone, breccia (various), brocatello (Spanish), carnelian, chalcedony (green chrome, white), chrysoprase, citrine, coral, crystal (rock), emerald, garnet (alamandine), glass (Roman, blue [some fire damage]), jasper (di Barga, brown, dark brown, green, green and red, mottled green and brown, mottled red, mottled yellow, orange, red, red variegated, red and white, Sicilian, yellow, yellow and red), lapis lazuli, mother-of-pearl, onyx, paragone, paste (green, orange, purple, red, yellow), plasma (green), prase (green), quartz (smoky), sealing wax (once), semesanto (Skyros), serpentine (green and yellow, verde, yellow), serpentinite, smaragdite, turquoise, Verde di Prato. The stand: oak carcass veneered with mahogany, partly carved and gilded.

Measurements

The cabinet: 210 x 130 x 64 cm; the stand: 108 x 134 x 90 cm

Place of origin

Rome

Order this image

Collection

Stourhead, Wiltshire

NT 731575

Caption

One of the most magnificent and elaborate items of furniture in the National Trust’s collections, this cabinet was once owned by Felice Peretti, Pope Sixtus V (b.1521; r.1585–90). Inside are 153 separate drawers for keeping secret items and precious personal collections, such as miniatures. The cabinet was designed to amaze and impress, so it was made with a range of rich materials, including gilt bronze, ebony, alabaster and a vast number of different hardstones, semi-precious materials and jewels, such as crystal, garnet, jasper, lapis lazuli, amethyst and mother-of-pearl. The exuberance of the design, which is modelled like a church façade, was characteristic of baroque papal taste, and it was probably commissioned by the pope c.1585 for display at his private palace in Rome. The cabinet was sold around 1740 by a Roman convent and purchased by the banker Henry Hoare II (1705–85) during a grand tour and displayed at his house at Stourhead in Wiltshire.

Summary

An ebony, gilt bronze and pietre dure cabinet, known as ‘The Pope’s Cabinet’, made in Rome, circa 1585, raised on a parcel-gilt mahogany stand (NT 731576), probably designed by either Henry Flitcroft (1697-1769) or John Michael Rysbrack (1694-1770), and made circa 1742-3 by ‘Mr James’, with carvings by John Boson (c.1696-1743). The cabinet architectural in form, of ebony inlaid with an abundant variety of pietre dure (hardstones), jewels, millefiori glass and antique intaglios, and mounted to both the front and sides with gilt bronze statuary and columns with gilt bronze capitals. Many of the stone inlays set into a border of silver. The facade of four graduated decorated ‘storeys’, comprising an ‘attic’ storey and three lower storeys each representing a different classical order – Composite, Corinthian and Ionic - and each centring on a ‘prospect’ door. The whole enclosing numerous ebony-veneered small drawers, and secret drawers, of various sizes, some still fitted with their original tassels of yellow, green and red silk thread, others with original bone handles. All raised on a breakfront plinth of ebony, veneered with partridge wood and with inlaid lines and moulded edges. Two of the carved figures – St. Peter & St. Paul - to the Corinthian storey added later, circa 1743, and almost certainly by John Boson (c. 1696-1743).

Full description

The Pope’s Cabinet (also known as The Sixtus Cabinet) – the most significant sixteenth-century example of Roman pietre dure cabinet-making in Britain – was made around 1585, probably for Pope Sixtus V Peretti (1521-1590; reigned 1585-1590), the so-called ‘Iron’ Pope, who beautified Rome with fountains, aqueducts and obelisks. Luxury cabinets such as this were made to display the most spectacular and costly products in ‘pietre dure’ (hard stones) inlay – an immensely time-consuming technique of marquetry using different colour pieces of highly polished marble, porphyry, jasper and other rich materials, set into silver borders. The cabinets were intended to contain and secure, though not to display, collections of gems, cameos, medals and other precious objects: this cabinet still contains seventy-three surviving Italian and Spanish portrait miniatures. According to Simon Swynfen Jervis and Dudley Dodd, historians of the cabinet, Pope Sixtus ‘is notorious for having in 1588 ordered the demolition of the Septizonium, a famous ornamental façade with three orders erected by the Emperor Severus in AD 204 at the foot of the Palatine Hill, and appropriated its materials, including rare marbles, for his own building projects, among them the Cappella Sistina in Santa Maria Maggiore’. It may be that some of the vast array of rare stones and marbles incorporated in this cabinet came from this, or a similar, source. Conservation carried out between 2006 and 2008 found that two of the amethysts to the lowest ‘order’ of the cabinet were drilled for wire, suggesting that they had once been destined for use in the jewellery trade. The same phase of work confirmed that an organ was once housed in the cabinet, with a keyboard set in the front. The cabinet was later purchased by Henry Hoare II (1705-85) – also known as ‘The Magnificent’ – during his Grand Tour of 1739-41. The vendor was reputedly a Roman convent to which it had been given by a nun, the last representative of the family of Pope Sixtus V. It first arrived at Stourhead in 1742 and caused a stir almost immediately. Walpole described it as ‘magnificent’; for Mrs Lybbe Powys it was the ‘so-much-talked-of-cabinet’; and William Beckford of Fonthill, not an admirer of Stourhead, wrote ecstatically, ‘Sixtus the Fifth’s cabinet is divine, I know – the bronzes are of extreme delicacy and elegance, and those lovely agates, alabasters and cornelians, mingled with the glittering mother-of-pearl, produce a rich effect, agreeable and grateful to the eye. It will be difficult to surpass, but we must try...’ The 1655 inventory of the Perettis’ Palazzo Felice in Rome describes the original stand as supported by gilt figures, in typically Roman style. In 1713, it was described as ‘a large pedestal of black and gilt wood’. In 1742-3, Henry Hoare II commissioned a new mahogany stand from the as yet unidentified cabinet-maker ‘Mr James’. It took the form of a triumphal arch, set with a crisply carved gilded portrait of Sixtus V, upheld by angels, after a silver medal (1585-6) by Lorenzo Fragni (1538-1619) and carved reliefs of the Pope’s Roman monuments by the carver John Boson (c. 1695-1743). Henry Hoare II clearly believed, and set great store by, the cabinet’s papal provenance. The cabinet is still displayed in a round-headed niche in the eponymous Cabinet Room at Stourhead, which was originally deeper and surmounted in 1802-3 by a giltwood papal tiara and other ‘cornice’ work by Thomas Chippendale Jr (1749-1823), who also provided a blue silk velvet gold-trimmed curtain, which was drawn up to reveal the cabinet. Partly concealed by this curtain, the cabinet would have gleamed in the semi-darkness like some great shrouded reliquary. During the 1902 Stourhead fire, the cabinet and stand were carried to safety, but the gilt cornice was unfortunately lost.

Provenance

Probably commissioned by Pope Sixtus V (1521-1590) about 1585; in the family palace in Rome by 1655 and by descent until bought by Henry Hoare II (1705-1785) in about 1740; subsequently at Stourhead by 1742 and acquired in 1947 when Stourhead, its collections and grounds were given to the National Trust by Sir Henry Hoare, 6th Bt. (1865-1947).

Makers and roles

Unknown, cabinetmaker

References

Jervis and Dodd 2015 Simon Swynfen Jervis and Dudley Dodd, Roman Splendour, English Arcadia: the English taste for pietre dure and the Sixtus Cabinet at Stourhead, 2015

View more details

Related articles