The table was eventually moved back to the Pitti Palace and—after a brief stint in the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister, Elisa, whom he'd appointed Grand Duchess of Tuscany (she was forced to abdicate when Napoleon fell from power)—the table returned to the house of Habsburg-Lorraine, where it stayed for 40 years, until it was transferred to Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the court’s official pietre dure workshop.
It was subsequently sold in 1870 by the Italian state to a British art dealer named William Spence, who turned around and sold it to Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, who would become first Duke of Westminster. The table was duly shipped from Italy to Grosvenor House, the family’s massive townhouse in London’s Mayfair, and stayed there for 70 years. In 1953, the family put the table up for auction, at which it passed into private, non-royal hands.
“You’ve got these 400 years of extraordinary provenance, which is very hard to find,” says Tomlinson. “And then you combine that with Vasari, and it’s just extraordinary.”
It’s not just about who owned the table, though. There’s the object itself. It’s more than five feet long and three and a half feet wide, and covered in giant pieces of agate, jasper, lapis lazuli, and other stones. “The more translucent stones have silver leaf underneath, so they shine,” Tomlinson says. “I had an expert come in here and tell me, ‘You’re lighting it all wrong, you should be lighting it by candlelight.’”
When a Table Is Not a Table
So the table is rare, beautiful, large, and historically important, but Tomlinson readily acknowledges that $11.6 million is still a tremendous amount of money to spend on a piece of furniture.
“The point is that it seems like an extraordinary amount of money for a design object or table,” he says.
But, Tomlinson continues, if you begin to think about it as a work of art, rather than a piece of decorative art, the price tag suddenly becomes less intimidating.
“For a work of art, it’s comparatively inexpensive,” he says, “which is a ridiculous thing to say: It’s still an extraordinary amount of money, but—because the art market has reached a strange moment in history where there’s no limit to prices—comparatively speaking, it’s good value.”
Tomlinson suggests that buyers compare the 400-year-old table to the price of a painting by Christopher Wool, a contemporary artist whose most expensive “word paintings” have sold for more than $20 million at auction. “It’s actually a beautiful thing,” he says. “You’re not just buying a concept.”
The gallery will exhibit the tabletop at Masterpiece “on an angled plinth,” he says, “so you can look at it and see the lip that goes around the edge.”