Attribué à VITTORIO BILLA dit V.B.L.

EXCEPTIONAL CABINET WITH THE PROFILES OF THE TWELVE CESSARS Naples, mid-17th century Ebony and eglomerate glass H. 55 cm, W. 99 cm, D. 35.2 cm Bibliography Alvar Gonzalez-Palacios, Il Gusto dei Principi: arte di Corte del XVII e del XVIII secolo, Milan, Longanesi, 1993, reproduced vol. 2, pp. 116-117 with a visible reassembly error in the orientation of one portrait and since restored Enrico Colle, Il mobile barocco in Italia - Arredi e decorazioni d'interni dal 1600 al 1738, Milan, Electa, 2000, reproduced p. 68 Of museum quality, this architectural cabinet in ebony has a front with twelve drawers decorated with medallion portraits of Roman emperors in eglomerate glass. The medallions represent the Twelve Caesars whose Lives were written by Suetonius (ca. 70 - ca. 122): Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otto, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Each medallion is made by gluing a thin sheet of gold or silver onto the support and covering it with a glass plate on which the design is drawn with a drypoint. A second layer of glass is then applied to fix the decoration. This technique, known since antiquity, was rediscovered during the Renaissance. It was developed in Naples, in the second quarter of the 17th century, under the impulse of the monogrammist VBL to whom the Twelve Caesars appearing on our cabinet are attributed (fig. 1). Our artist, identified by Alvar Gonzalez-Palacios with the glass painter Vitt orio Billa, active in Naples in 1635, is the author of several cabinets present in the most prestigious Italian collections, both private and public, such as the one exhibited in the 2000s at the Villa Medicea of Cerreto Guidi or the one in the Stibbert Museum in Florence, whose grisaille decoration depicts scenes from the Old Testament (fig. 2). His skills as a draughtsman are also evident in his coloured works. This is shown, for example, in another cabinet, a signed landscape or two panels depicting hunting scenes in the Villa Medicea in Poggio in Caiano, which art historians have compared to the Twelve Caesars in our cabinet (fi g. 3-4).