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"View Slideshow\n\nMost collectors crave certainty, the knowledge that a desirable object can be attributed to an individual of outstanding merit. And for the most part, that's what dealers deliver\u2014except when it comes to Italian painted furniture from the 18th and early 19th centuries. Despite the fine brushwork and creative carpentry, these delectable chairs, consoles, settees, and more are the work of craftsmen whose anonymity has frustrated the most assiduous of scholars.\n\nNo one can name, for instance, the artisan responsible for a Venetian rococo commode that appeared at Christie's, London, last winter, its flanks decorated with romantic ruins for the noble Morosini family. But that didn't deter an unidentified European private collector from purchasing it for $779,830, more than four times the high estimate. The description given a chinoiserie piece coming up for sale at Sotheby's, New York, on December 8, dutifully limns the where, when, and what\u2014Genoa, circa 1730, a bureau cabinet from the estate of San Francisco philanthropist Dodie Rosekrans\u2014though the who remains unclear. The stately object is nonetheless expected to bring as much as $180,000.\n\nPerplexing ambiguities aside, this school of furnituremaking, ranging stylistically from rococo froth to neoclassical pomp, has been enchanting connoisseurs since the Apennine Peninsula dominated Grand Tour itineraries. American and English collectors in the early 20th century often favored curvaceous Venetian Baroque works and used them as accents (they surely discovered, as others have since, that decorating exclusively with painted furniture is like gorging on marzipan). Choice examples from Lombardy, Piedmont, and the Veneto caught the eye of International Harvester vice president James Deering, who bought them to furnish Vizcaya, his Miami villa turned museum, which was completed in 1917; several of those pieces also illustrate William M. Odom's magisterial two-volume A History of Italian Furniture (1919). Socialite Marella Agnelli posed for Horst amid painted Piedmontese chairs and consoles at her Turin estate in the 1960s, and in the same decade the photographer snapped artist Cy Twombly in his Rome apartment in the company of faded aquamarine chairs drizzled with worn gilt.\n\nThe genre's attraction is easy to understand\u2014it is cheerful and sensually exuberant. \"The interpretation of antique forms is more creative among the Italians than the French, who were more rigorous,\" notes Will Strafford, head of European furniture at Christie's, New York. \"Italians tended to be more fantastical and wonderfully whimsical.\" Extravagant silhouettes and candy colors are an undeniable part of the appeal. As the interior decorator Ruby Ross Wood wrote in 1917, Italian painted furniture is \"the salvation of many a too-dark room.\" The polychromy had a practical purpose, too. \"Italy doesn't have beautiful exotic woods,\" says Jan Willem van Haaren, a European furniture specialist at Sotheby's, New York, explaining that the paint hides carcasses of humble softwoods such as beech, pine, and poplar. In July a quartet of early-1800s Northern Italian side chairs embellished with putti sold at Christie's, London, for a surprisingly reasonable $8,760; former owners include Ryanair founder Tony Ryan and financier Saul Steinberg.\n\nAn especially rich resource for painted pieces is Sotheby's, London, where the furniture is championed by deputy chairman Mario Tavella. As for why prices can careen from a few thousand dollars to more than three quarters of a million, it is all about the finish. \"If it's not original, run in the other direction,\" advises Helen Costantino Fioratti of the Manhattan gallery L'Antiquaire &amp;amp; the Connoisseur.\n\nRetouched or not, however, the best Italian painted furniture shares a sparkling character its unknown makers might have called briosit\u00E0. \"Just the other day,\" Fioratti recounts, \"a client walked in and said, \u2018I want a painted piece to cheer me up.'\" Who couldn't use more of that?\n\nClick here to see a selection of Italian painted furniture."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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