Italian specimen marble and terrazzo table top

Northern Italy (Veneto/Friuli), for the British market, c.1880–1900

A Victorian specimen table reimagined through a Venetian lens. The rectangular top is inlaid with thirty-two circular specimen marbles arranged in a strict grid and set within a plain black marble border. The roundels include portoro, Belgian nero, verde antico, giallo Siena, various rosso and griotte marbles, alabaster, bardiglio greys and Carrara whites, together with other brecciated and local Italian stones.

The circles are “suspended” in a cream terrazzo (seminato) ground, peppered with hand-cut offcuts of the same stones in red, green, black and ochre. The effect is part geological chart, part abstract composition: disciplined geometry softened by the informal scatter of the seminato field. The top is laid on a single slab of fossil-rich black limestone, visible on the reverse, which carries a dense pattern of tiny shell and fossil inclusions.

This is very likely the work of a north Italian marble workshop, probably in the Veneto or Friuli, where terrazzo and marble mosaic were a regional speciality in the later 19th century. It borrows the Grand Tour language of Florentine and Roman specimen tops – the love of named marbles and encyclopaedic variety – but dissolves it into Venetian seminato terrazzo. The result is an unusual hybrid that feels almost modern in its graphic clarity while remaining firmly rooted in Victorian connoisseurship: a quiet outlier in the specimen-table tradition, and almost certainly a one-off workshop experiment made for export to the British market.

Dimensions

Approx. 70 cm × 38 cm

Condition

Wear and surface marks consistent with age and use; light scratches and small losses to some edges and chips in the terrazzo ground on close inspection. One corner of the border with an old knock. The surface has been gently cleaned and given a light coat of microcrystalline wax to deepen the colour and provide a soft sheen, without over-restoration. Structurally sound and ready to use as a table top, wall panel or to mount on a custom base.

Notes

Sold as a top only.