Fireplace

The monumental porcelain fireplace created by the Manifattura Ginori in 1754 under the supervision of Gaspero Bruschi, was originally intended to adorn the back wall of the Gallery at Villa Le Corti, where Carlo Ginori had set up an exhibition room for the most valuable works of his production. 

The fireplace, of remarkable scenic impact, can be divided into three main sections: the hearth at the bottom, the mirror in the centre, and the crest at the top. The first consists of an architectural structure made up of two side pilasters with telamons supporting an architrave with volutes, decorated with raised festoons, masks, and a shell valve with a female face at the centre. Inside, the hearth is lined with tiles (or "ambrogette") depicting rural scenes and views painted in blue on a white background, probably from Delft. At the centre, the horizontal mirror, flanked by two connecting volutes with the dividing shelf, is enclosed within a frame decorated with floral tendrils and shells in the corners. In the upper portion, above a double curved band originating from a shell,  there stand the porcelain reductions of  Michelangelo’s allegories of Twilight and Dawn. The complex structure ends, at the top centre, with an oval bas-relief depicting putti scattering flowers, taken from a composition by Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, capped at the top by a large shell and volutes.

A true masterpiece of the early Ginori period production, the Fireplace thus composed is a one-of-a-kind in the history of the Doccia factory and attests to how the models of Florentine Renaissance and late Baroque sculpture were employed not only for the creation of small-scale sculptures but also in compositions of great scope and impressive decorative and scenic complexity.