Pair of Blackamoor candle holders, France

Pair of Blackamoor candle holders, French manufacture, Paris, 1783. Gilt and patinated bronze, grey marble, white marble. cm. h 43x 12 x 12 The pair of candlesticks, made of burnished bronze, depicts two putti in exotic clothing; the two candle holders in fact wear only a turban and a flap of fabric around the waist. The face is decorated with earrings and strings of gilded bronze beads; in their hands they hold cornucopias adorned with an acanthus leaf motif. The oriental-style clothes and the servile attitude of the figures allow us to identify the two putti as "Moors", an iconography that developed in the second half of the 15th century in Venice, then spread in the following centuries in France, Holland and also England. The Blackamoors rest on a grey marble block decorated with festoons, which in turn is positioned on a white marble pedestal. Engraved on the pad of the figure is the date "1783".