PROBABLY VENICE, 19TH/20TH CENTURY

These playful and stylish panels are decorated throughout with the innovative technique of cutting up polychrome-decorated prints to imitate the visual effects of lacquer, known variously as lacca povera, arte povera, or lacca contrafatta. This technique involved laying prints on a generally light colored ground, often pale blue, yellow or white, which was then covered with a specific yellowish varnish called sandracca. The interest of the sandracca was to simulate the shiny and glossy surface of Asian lacquer while attenuating the contrast of the glued printed vignettes. In Italy, the birthplace of lacca povera, the inspiration for this type of decoration originated from the intense commercial exchanges that port cities like Venice and Genoa entertained with Asia throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with every type of lacquered goods being imported from both Japan and China. Although Venice, with its extensive trading contacts with the East, was one of the first cities in Italy, and in Europe, to produce imitations of Asian lacquer and pioneered the manufacture of various faux lacquerwares in order to produce a more affordable version of the rare and extremely expensive oriental import, every region of Italy had its own distinctive tradition of producing japanned furniture and several centers for the production of arte povera by so-called laccatori soon flourished in various cities to satisfy growing demand for this lacquer work. Italian imitation lacquer eventually became a substitute to not only its Asian counterpart, but it also proved more time and cost effective than the traditional lacquer work performed in other European centers such as Berlin, Dresden, and Paris.