Description

Box enamel sterling silver  925 Gold plated with translucent fired enamel on guillochè. Box enamel sterling silver  has at the center fine oval miniature cm. 9.5 x 12.5 hand painted in tempera on vegetable ivory plate by the painter Anna Maria Manfriani.

Box enamel sterling silver  in the miniature reproduces the portrait of Paolina Borghese Bonaparte, known as “The beautiful Italian”, by Salomon-Guilaume Counis.

Measure cm. 17.5 x 23 x 3.4. Weight gr. 1956. 

The Box enamel sterling silver was designed and produced in Florence, Italy in 2006.

In the Salimbeni factory with manual workmanship by talented artisan artists with a thick slab and large reinforcements suitable for withstanding numerous high heat glazing firings at around 800°C. 

On Box enamel sterling silver there is the miniature of  portrait of Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon

She married Prince Borghese and died young. Canova had the time to sculpt the famous statue located in Villa Borghese in Rome and Odiot, a famous Parisian silversmith, created the famous champagne cup modeled on Paolina’s breast. Of sisters with the name of Pauline, Napoleon had only one. I too have heard the story of the dead woman buried on All Saints Day. There weren’t two. Let’s go deeper. The image reproduced in the thumbnail was also entitled “the beautiful Italian”.I was thinking because Paolina had married an Italian, but in any case all the Bonapartes were of Tuscan Livorno – Grosseto origin even if they ended up in Corsica which, in any case, had become French a few years before the birth of Napoleon. The last few years she lived between Viareggio and the Garfagnana and then in the Fabbricotti villa in Florence where she died at the age of 45 of liver cancer. But she is buried in Rome in the Borghese family chapel. She measures cm. 17.5 x 23 x 3.4. Weight gr. 1956-. Designed and produced in Florence.