I Musei Civici
a Palazzo Ciacchi

Mirrors

Mirrors

The image and its double mirrors from the Mosca collection

From the 16th century onwards, mirrors became collector’s items in Wunderkammern (“wonder rooms”) and covered the walls of cabinets. They were highly valued for their reflective and deforming properties and included in the list of ‘mirabilia’. In this section, a series of carved giltwood mirrors from the Mosca collection dating from the mid 17th century to the mid 18th century are on display.

Two Venetian-style mirrors, with an elongated shape and shaped profile, have a frame with a smooth groove sloping towards the outside and profiles decorated with delicate “rocaille” motifs. Another pair of small oval mirrors can be referred to the Lombard-Emilian production for the decoration carved in tortiglione, a motif widespread in that geographical area as a stone ornament of portals and conches of windows. A sumptuous mirror inspired by the French models Louis XV (1700-1710) and those of the Regency era (Régence 1715-1720), a type that had a wide spread in northern Italy. Rectangular in size, it is characterized by a decorative pattern composed of a human protome from which intertwined plant racemes depart, ending with flower buds, in each of the four corners. It has a decoration of Egyptian palmette, inserted in the center of each of the two short sides and a rosette pattern from which interwoven vegetable racemes depart, at the center of each of the two long sides. In a niche there is a mirror of eighteenth-century Venetian production. Rectangular in shape with a golden frame, it shows an elaborate cimasa with a shaped folder that contains another mirror surrounded by perforated volutes and shells and jagged carvings along the external profile. In front there is a mirror with a soft internal contour and delicate “rocaille” carvings that adorn the entire external profile and are to be traced back to the eighteenth century. The high cymatium encloses a small oval mirror with lateral profiles consisting of carved oak leaves wrapped and small flowers with two peducci in the lower extremities. The mirrors ideally dialogue with an artistic mirror entirely covered with delicate elm leaves and glass flowers, exhibited at the Civic Museums of Pesaro; a precious luxury object, perhaps a wedding gift, made by Murano workers in the second half of the eighteenth century.