Despite signs to the contrary, conspicuous consumption is not what it used to be. Most exhibitions of decorative arts from the past, especially Europe’s monarchical age, drive that fact home in thrilling, and sometimes off-putting, fashion. But few shows do so with quite the dazzling vehemence of “Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure From the Palaces of Europe,” a stealth blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A sumptuous sprawl of 170 objects borrowed from palaces and former palaces (that is, museums) all over Europe, it is the first in-depth survey of the arts and crafts of pietre dure. That Italian term, which translates as hard rock or hardstone, refers foremost to an intricate inlay of finely cut, highly polished slices of semiprecious stones: agate, lapis lazuli, jasper, carnelian, alabaster, rock crystal, amethyst.

Pietre dure could be flat. Fashioned into radiantly colored geometric patterns, floral designs, landscapes or mythological scenes, it was incorporated into tabletops, cabinets of all sizes, wall panels, portable altars, jewelry boxes and other furnishings. Such works could also be in the round: carved hardstone sculptural busts, statuettes, vases, snuff boxes, cameos, jewelry and miraculously thin-walled bowls…

And yet pietre dure, which began its ascent in Renaissance Italy, had an almost self-effacing quality. Like Chinese scholars’ rocks or topiary, it is self-evidently a collaboration of human and natural ingenuity; it should appeal as much to rock hounds as to the art-fixated. Pietre dure was a quintessential art of the Renaissance, with its expansive attitude toward science and knowledge in general, and its optimistic view of human possibility. This art faced outward, exploring natural history while pushing manual craft to rarefied extremes…

Stone had been treasured and constantly reused for millenniums, as suggested by the show’s small opening gallery devoted to “origins.” The displays reach back to ancient Egypt, in the form of a lion-size sphinx, and ancient Rome, in a tiny perfume bottle in swirling agate, and to 12th-century Italy, as a hefty jug in rock crystal from a Norman workshop attests. Closer to home is a small, house-shaped reliquary casket tiled and shingled in fiery shades of pietre dura. It comes from the workshop of the Florentine sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio, dating from around 1490…

At the show’s heart is the constantly shifting use of stone, especially the flat pietre dure. Sometimes stone is exploited for its own fabulous color and texture, as in the bold geometric tabletops of papal Rome or a Venetian cabinet that is really more a rock-solid architectural model than it is furniture.
Sometimes delicacy prevailed, especially in pictorially inclined Florence. There, the stones’ textures, colors, shadings and inherent light were extensively micromanaged into descriptive schemes that often challenge painting. Examples include the fabulously accurate undergrowth of grape vines, butterflies and birds on a table with Eucharistic symbols, and a tiny austere landscape in which single pieces of lapis and agate form sky and hills. Inlaid details like a white church and green poplars sharpen the implicit spatial recession.

Sometimes the two approaches — stone as stone, and stone as paint — are pitted against each other. In a panel depicting Abraham and Isaac, description and spatial logic are disrupted by the wonderful textures of the stone, which turn the image into a kind of puzzle. The Castruccis, an Italian family that worked in the court of Rudolph II in Prague in the early 17th century, fine-tune this effect with striking contrasts of colors and textures that imbue small, Breughel-like scenes with an explosive energy bordering on animation.

The dialogue between pietra dure and painting intensifies, as trompe l’oeil comes into fashion. On several occasions in the exhibition, pietra dure “paintings” hang beside the actual paintings on which they were based. Their stay-fast colors and paint-by-numbers crispness tend to carry the day, especially in a view of the Pantheon from the 1790s. As an antidote to the general refinement, one parting shot is a game table from the early 19th century: its chessboard, made from ancient marble, is set in a slab of petrified wood whose textures resemble the splatterings of contemporary spin painting.

“Pietra Dure” has something for every taste, meaning that almost all of us will find something in it that seems disconcerting or ugly in its excess. But over all, this extraordinary show suggests why the quest for beauty may be hardwired into humans. Nature habituated us to beauty, and we feel driven to equal its high, inspiring standards.

Roberta Smith
New York Times