Silk page fan, painted at distemper and embroidered. This piece of the collection is quite interesting despite its simplicity. In the only central scene, a young woman accepts a rose from a child, the whole is surrounded by paillettes, at the sides, it has some decorations partly painted and partly embroidered. The symbology seems to be quite defined and recognizable in the web between the quiver with arrows and the flaming sickle; a particular is very curious, upon the love’s symbols there are two flaming hearts. This could be seen as a confirm of what said before, but the dresses of the characters ( particularly the straw hats of Florence very fashionable in the last quarter of the XVIII century) and the typology of the ivory silver damascened sticks ( we also find in nr 075), very simple, all this makes me think that the period of joy and cheerfulness at court was over. I would put this kind of fans in the period between the storming of the Bastille and the decapitation of Queen Marie Antoniette, and as geographical area between Austria and Germany ( a sort of mourning for the French monarchy, considering that Marie Antoniette belonged to the Asburgo Lorena family).
"Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail."
Leonardo Da Vinci
