Set of Dinner Knives (14), from a Service Made for Pauline Bonaparte and Prince Camillo Borghese
1789–1820
Martin-Guillaume Biennais (French, 1764–1843) Pierre-Benoît Lorillon (French, 1757–1816) Paris
Paris
These dinner knives are part of a vast service made for Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline on the occasion of her marriage to the Roman nobleman Camillo Borghese, Sixth Prince of Sulmona.
In the years after the French Revolution, architects and designers adopted the visual language of ancient Greece and Rome to express the new imperial order. Napoleon, hoping to promote Paris’s luxury trades, commissioned several silver dinner services as gifts to be sent abroad.
Gilded silver and steel blades