This majestic Fernandine piece is a superb example of early nineteenth-century furniture. It adheres to the characteristics of the French Empire style, which proposes a reinterpretation of the classical elements used so often since the end of the eighteenth century. There was also a change in the materials used, with a preference at this time for mahogany and ormolu, although the latter is habitually replaced in Spain by carved and gilded wood.

This voluminous table is made up of a central foot in the form of a broad clustered pier that supports the circular drum, which has a large apron for the drawers and a top covered with morocco leather. The base of the column opens out into four large projecting platforms for the real protagonists of the piece, the sphinxes. Hieratic, muscle-bound and classical in their facial features, they rise with their breasts covered by a tied cloth. The slightly open wings with volutes at the tips serve as supports for the tabletop, together with the foliate capitals on their heads. The sphinx was a very common decorative feature at this period. Among those who helped to spread it were Percier and Fontaine, Napoleon’s designers and architects, whose famous publication, Recueil de décorations intérieures comprenant tout ce qui a rapport à l’ameublement, shows this figure time and again as chair arms or, as in this case, as supports. The taste for the use of these mythological creatures in furnishings of a certain solemnity is reflected in one of the most iconic pieces of courtly furniture of the time, the Table of the Sphinxes, preserved at the Royal Palace in Madrid since its acquisition by Charles IV in 1803. Agustín Argüelles Álvarez, the Minister of the Governance of the Realm for the Iberian Peninsula and Adjacent Islands, had himself portrayed next to this table between 1820 and 1821 by the painter Ricardo María Navarrete Fox, a work currently preserved at the Congreso de los Diputados (Congress of Deputies), Spain’s national parliament building.

This fact is of some consequence when we come to consider the official importance of this piece of furniture, probably used by Ferdinand VII’s Cabinet of Ministers to judge by the information found on the eight drawers. On the front of each one is a gilt metal inscription, different in each case, inside a cartouche with ebony outlines and metal fillets tipped with palmettes. They identify the documentation destined for each compartment: “Ministerios” (Ministries), “Estado” (State), “Gracia y Justicia” (Grace and Justice), “Guerra” (War), “Marina” (Marine), “Hacienda” (Inland Revenue), “Gobernación” (Governance) and “Secretario del Consejo de Señores Ministros” (Secretary of the Cabinet of Honourable Ministers). On the tabletop are metal cartouches with palmettes. Besides the coat-ofarms of Spain that appears on the one over the ‘Ministries’ drawer, each one also contains the abbreviation of the ministry named on the drawer beneath and a number repeated on its key.

Not only do the inscriptions provide us with information on the probable use of this large pedestal table, but they are also an important indicator of the precise period when the piece was made. All the ministries named have a long history behind them except one, the Ministry of Governance, which was created in 1812, as recorded in Article 222 of the Constitution of Cádiz, and suppressed in 1823, when it was renamed Ministry of the Interior. This would allow us to date the piece between these two years, though its characteristics might permit the date of execution to be further narrowed down to the late 1810s. Even so, certain questions remain unanswered, such as the fact that there is only one drawer for Governance when there were two Bureaux created under this title: Governance of the Realm for the Iberian Peninsula and Adjacent Islands, and Governance of the Realm for Overseas. In any case, the leather surface and the drawers testify to the piece’s use as a conference table whose drawers are quite likely to have held some of the most important documents related to the administration of the kingdom in the early nineteenth century.

Mario Mateos Martín