Casket

Wooden casket – a cuboidal, decorative box, made in Italy at the end of the 19th century as a practical trinket for a desk, to equip a library or a clerk's office. Structural elements veneered and inlaid with black painted detail and contouring. Inside the casket there is a lining made of light red velvet (preserved under the lid). The loss of internal veneering revealed fragments of a newspaper in Italian, used for the structural gluing of the wood (under the cover of fabric), with a text containing, among others, the date – 1891. It has a single, hinged lid on the long edge. The brass lock with a keyway on top, and a plaque on the front side. The lid and base are rounded, stylized as books, decorated on the spines with painted stripes and floral patterns. The outer wall from the front with applied vertical, wooden half-rollers imitating volumes placed on a shelf. This is emphasized by the numbering painted on their "spines" in Roman notation, from I to XI. The top of the lid is decorated with an allegorical figural composition made in the intarsia technique. In a field separated by a rectangular border, there is a couple dancing to the accompaniment of guitarists.

Jarosław Giemza