Arbalète à jalet décorée, balestra a pallotole,... - Lot 139 - Pierre Bergé & Associés

Arbalète à jalet décorée, balestra a pallotole, belle reconstitution dans le goût italien de la fin du XVIe ou début XVIIe siècle, XIXe siècle. An Italian decorated birding stonebow, Balestra a pallottole, finely constructed in the manner of the late 16th or early 17th century, 19th century. With slender steel bow retained by a pair of chiselled iron strapwork brackets and fitted with a string of twisted cords, long slender walnut tiller of characteristic form carved with architectural mouldings in relief over its entire length and over each side, carved with a female grotesque in high relief and partly in the round along the upper side above the trigger, carved faceted stopper-shaped pommel inset with a raised bone plaque (chipped), an architectural finial of walnut, bone and fluted iron projecting in two stages forward of the bow, inlaid with engraved mother-of-pearl plaques over the forward half of the tiller, including marine monsters, cornucopias and grotesque masks all heightened by further inlays of horn and pearl foliage, flowerheads and fruit, and additionally inlaid with mother-of-pearl pellets within the moulded patterns along the top and the sides, fitted with a pair of chiselled iron architectural foresight pillars, matching folding back-sight, the bowstring-release and the trigger-guard chiselled en suite, and the trigger mechanism set by a button projecting forward of the trigger-guard (one piece of ebony veneer and several pieces of mother-of-pearl missing). L.: 94 cm - W.: 44 cm. This bow is a very accurate and well-made copy evidently intended for use. The iron parts are finely chiselled and may have been utilised from a Stonebow of the period represented. Bows of this type were widely used in Italy and France for killing sitting birds with a small stone; the stone was fitted into a pocket held between a tiered pair of bowstrings (not of the conventional type now fitted to the present bow). Sportsmen using bows of this distinctive type are illustra