Turin: Carabineiri find the magnificent eighteenth-century desk of the great cabinetmaker Pietro Piffetti

A work by the great 18th-century cabinetmaker Pietro Piffetti (Turin, 1701 - 1777) has been recovered in Turin. It is a double-bodied desk with precious ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays worth more than €2,000,000, considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the most important master cabinetmaker of the Savoy period.

Carabinieri of the Turin Cultural Heritage Protection Unit had received a report that the work was not displayed in the exhibition “Genius and Mastery: Furniture and cabinetmakers of the Savoy Court on display at Venaria,” and from there began the investigation from which it emerged that the desk had been sold to a private citizen and then, in the absence of authorization exported abroad, had been transported first to France, then to Switzerland, and as a final destination to the United States, where it had been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the late 1990s and for a long period.
As a result of the investigation, the work was traced to a private individual who, in good faith, learned of the illicit possession and returned it toItaly.

Alberto Bonisoli, minister of cultural heritage, wrote in a note: “The exceptional recovery of the valuable desk of the 18th century, made by Pietro Piffetti, an important master cabinetmaker of the Savoy period, which disappeared after World War II from Italy, is the result of intense investigative activity by the men and women of the Comando Tutela Patrimonio Culturale who have carried out a challenging and delicate work, with the collaboration and support of Mibac officials, to return to the community a masterpiece of Italian art illegally stolen from the heritage of the State. I am proud of this new and extraordinary achievement.”

Mario Turetta, director of the Consortium of the Royal Residences of Savoy, announced that the work will be brought to the La Venaria Reale Restoration Center in the coming days and then displayed by Christmas at the Reggia di Venaria, explaining, “The goal is that this incredibly valuable asset will not remain hidden from the public but will be displayed as soon as possible. Now the work will be taken to the Venaria restoration center with the hope of displaying it as early as Christmas, perhaps including it in the visitor’s itinerary, in honor of Piffetti’s genius and those who allowed its return. The funds are already there both to restore it and to exhibit it. Then the work will return to Palazzo Chiablese, its original home.”

Piffetti made the desk between 1767 and 1768, based on a design by the royal architect Benedetto Alfieri to be placed in a small wall compartment of the ducal apartments in Turin’s Palazzo Chiablese, as it was conceived not as an independent piece of movable furniture but as an integration of the decorative apparatus of the room, thus linked to the boiseries, on which rested the lower tilted body, while the momentum of the hanging wing riser was accommodated by a high wall niche, cut to size to contain it.

Turin: Carabineiri find the magnificent eighteenth-century desk of the great cabinetmaker Pietro Piffetti

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