Belle et riche arquebuse de chasse à rouet,... - Lot 149 - Pierre Bergé & Associés

Belle et riche arquebuse de chasse à rouet, Dresde vers 1605. A fine and richly ornate wheel-lock sporting rifle, Dresden, circa 1605. With heavy octagonal barrel swamped at the muzzle, rifled with seven grooves, struck with a mark, a halberd (Neue Støckel 5047), engraved with foliage and a pair of birds over the breech and with panels of conventional leaf ornament over the muzzle, silver fore-sight and iron back-sight (the barrel an early working replacement), blued iron lock overlaid with a later gilt-brass tracery panel engraved with a scrollwork pattern inhabited by a winged female half-figure, fitted with later domed gilt-brass wheel-cover engraved with a band of leaves encircling the sides and in a band of scrolling foliage, sliding pan-cover with later gilt brass release cast with a mask in low relief, the dog decorated with a monster and grotesque masks, and the internal working parts partly brightly blued, fruitwood full stock signed with the stockmaker's initials C R on a horn plaque behind the barrel tang, finely decorated over its full length with a series of engraved horn plaques, alternately solid and pierced, including pairs of scrolling monsters over the length of the fore-end, a design of swagged strapwork scrolls supported by putti and filled with small masks opposite the lock, a female half-figure involving snails and dragonflies on the underside of the breech, a pair of grotesque mask cartouches flanking the barrel tang, the cheek-piece decorated with an amusing allegorical plaque involving a group of grotesques and imp-like human figures in mock combat, the entire scheme of inlay punctuated by small plaques involving green-stained horn subjects, including a mythical bird on the cheek-piece, all within horn segmental lines, both the fore-end and the butt with engraved horn beadwork and leaf border panels, and the entire inlaid scheme heightened within a framework of incised scrollwork, horn butt-plate engraved with a female allegorical figure rid