Pizza restaurant antique goes for £1m

8:43am Wednesday 5th December 2007

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THE table which stood for years near the bar of an Italian restaurant in York's Assembly Rooms has helped fetch more than a million pounds at auction.

The console, along with an accompanying cabinet, went for £1,084,500 at Sotheby's in London yesterday during a sale of Italian and Continental furniture.

An undisclosed portion of the proceeds will go to the table's owner, York Conservation Trust, which bought it for less than £100,000 when it acquired the 18th century Assembly Rooms from City of York Council five years ago.

Philip Thake, the trust's chief executive, who attended the sale, said: "We are highly delighted."

He said the money raised would help pay for restoration of other artefacts in the building, but would also help fund a new garden the trust was going to create in the grounds of St Anthony's Hall, in Peasholme Green, the former Borthwick Institute. The gardens would be open to the public and designed specially for disabled, partially-sighted and blind people.

A spokesman for Sotheby's said the table went to a private European buyer.

He said: "Four bidders, two on the telephone and two in the saleroom, competed for the ebony cabinet by Giacomo Herman - depicting the churches of Rome and including a virginal - and its reunited sumptuous gilt wood console carved with naked youths kneeling to support the weight of the cabinet - for almost five minutes, until it finally sold to a private European collector on the telephone."

Mario Tavella, deputy chairman of Sotheby's Europe, said: "The fantastic price achieved for such a remarkable piece of Italian furniture demonstrates that there are numerous serious collectors who have not been influenced by the current minimalist trend and desire pieces of extraordinary design."

The Press reported last week how the table had stood in Ask restaurant, in the Assembly Rooms in Blake Street, with drinkers and diners resting their glasses on it, unaware of its true value.

It had been at the Assembly Rooms since at least the early 1950s, and was thought to have been bought for the city by former Lord Mayor John Bowes Morrell, who founded the conservation trust, and was a keen collector of Italian furniture.

An expert from Sotheby's discovered the console was a missing section of a 17th century masterpiece, believed to have been lost for ever. With the two sections re-united, the furniture was considered to be part of the most important piece of Roman baroque furniture ever to come on the market.