Table with a Mosaic Top "Apollo and the Muses"

King Victor Emmanuel II presented this Apollo and the Muses mosaic table to Empress Maria Alexandrovna, the wife of Alexander II, when she was travelling in Italy.
On the tabletop, Apollo is depicted in one of his customary guises – as the sun god driving a chariot, while as the god of poetry and music he is surrounded by attributes of the nine muses: a lyre, a tragic mask, flutes, a scroll, a stylus, a celestial globe with astrological symbols and so on.
The Florentine mosaic was created by one of the leading exponents of the technique in the 1870s. The semiprecious stones and other ornamental minerals were selected for colour with superb taste and shaped with exquisite precision to be assembled in a carefully considered composition in which the areas that convey a deeper meaning are framed by an elaborate plant pattern.
The base of the table was created especially for this mosaic by the well-known craftsman Rinaldo Barbetti. The wooden frame is enclosed by a three-part copper bas-relief that presents the muses and other mythological personages in various scenes. Those are separated by small niches containing depictions of great poets, who can be recognized by the works that each of them is shown holding – the Iliad for Homer, the Aeneid for Virgil and the Divine Comedy for Dante.