‘Le Sphinx’ was the first French steamship built for military purposes and was armed with three long guns and eight 24-pound carronades.

It was built in Rochefort in 1829 to the design of engineer Hubert. It was 47 metres long and 8 metres wide, while on the outside the wheels were 11 metres wide and the paddle wheels were 5.98 metres in diameter. The vessel had a displacement of 777 tons and used a 160 HP steam engine, built by Fawcett of Liverpool, with which it reached a speed of 7 knots. Like all early steamships, however, she was also equipped with three masts for sailing equipment.

In 1832 she towed the pontoon “Luxor” with the Egyptian obelisk of Ramses II from Alexandria to Le Havre.

In 1845, when she was assigned to shuttle between Toulon and Algiers, she struck a reef east of Algiers and sank. Wooden model of a wheeled steamship.

Etching of a French galley.

The four marble sculptures depicting the ‘founding fathers’ that greet visitors at the entrance to the Wolfsoniana symbolise the chronological starting point – the unification of Italy – of the historical period examined through the works in the collection: the period between 1880 and 1950. The four sculptures depict full-length figures of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini, Camillo Benso Count of Cavour, and Vittorio Emanuele II.

The buttero, Cambellotti's most celebrated artistic icon, seems to embody the most emblematic expression of his assonance with the plastic tensions of Futurist poetics: the stylized and dynamic image of the horseman of the Roman Agro, replicated in bucchero in 1924, in fact induces one to discern the definitive maturation of his direct expressive attunement with Futurist researches, as also confirmed by his close association with Giacomo Balla, who in 1908 published a pastel portrait of him in “Novissima”. The small black ceramic sculpture depicts a 'buttero' (cowboy), a traditional herdsman of the Lazio and Tuscany region, on horseback.

A member of the artistic group formed around “The House,” a magazine of “aesthetics, decorum and government of the modern home” founded in 1908 by Edoardo De Fonseca, Duilio Cambellotti shared with the other exponents of the movement, including Vittorio Grassi and Umberto Bottazzi, the inspiration for the aesthetic models of the Arts & Crafts: especially in the reevaluation of traditional craft techniques-such as the abolition of the use of nails and assembly by joints-that made it possible to achieve, through a simplified construction process, a rigorous and linear decoration. The Bench of the Helms, executed at the Royal National Institute of Industrial Instruction at San Michele in Rome to a design by Cambellotti, was first exhibited in 1925 at the Second International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Monza in one of the five rooms of the Roman section, the so-called “sala del mare,” set up by architect Alessandro Limongelli. Wooden bench.

The “Le curiose” chest was part of the “Sala da Studio,” designed and furnished by Roman artist Duilio Cambellotti at the First International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Monza in 1923. Executed in walnut by Fedro Guerrieri based on Cambellotti's design, the cabinet presents a sober and archaic form that recalls the rustic furniture, typical of peasant furnishings, that were a source of inspiration for the artist since the time of his collaboration on the setting of the Capanna dell'Agro Romano, presented at the 1911 International Exhibition in Rome. The cabinet is decorated with a number of bronze inserts also made by Cambellotti, as in the case of the two female figures lying down, looking towards the keyhole, which gave the cabinet its name. A similar specimen of the lock is preserved at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. Squared trunk made of walnut wood, with six bronze decorations molded into female figures.

Having become the owner of the Ducal Palace in Guastalla in 1896, the entrepreneur Flavio Mossina – already living in the Congo, where he began to develop his passion for exoticism – began a series of restoration works on the building, to make it his home and the headquarters of the "Trancerie Mossina" company, one of the first and most important plywood factories in Italy. Among the rooms he designed, mention must be made of the Egyptian Room, from which the furnishings preserved at the Wolfsoniana come, and whose decorative apparatus – commissioned from the Orientalist painter Fabio Fabbi, the probable author of the project perhaps together with his brother Alberto, – was executed around 1917 by the painter and architect Tommaso Aroldi, who trained between 1885 and 1892 at the academies of Parma and Florence, where he was a pupil of Giovanni Fattori.
The two pieces of furniture on display at the Wolfsoniana – the Nineveh chest of drawers and the pyramidal bed, richly decorated with ivory and semi-precious stone inlays-document in an exemplary manner the visionary and imaginative Orientalist spirit that imprinted the chamber's artistic features: a pastiche that combined exotic and historicist suggestions from different eras and geographic areas, as attested by the extravagant figurative inventions of the woodwork elements on deposit at the Wolfsoniana, depicting myths and legends of kings, pharaohs, gods and heroes, set in remote moors, from the Far East to Latin America, to recreate a seductive and imaginative exotic atmosphere. In fact, the reference to ancient Egypt, evoked in the monumental pyramidal structure of the bed headboard, surrounded by walls and towers, dialogued with the fantastic view of the city of Nineveh, an ancient urban center on the left bank of the Tigris in northern Mesopotamia, carved into the front of the dresser.
The peculiar aspect of the Egyptian Room in the Ducal Palace of Guastalla, however, is represented above all by the fact that-although at the time it was very much in vogue to propose, alongside historicist furnishings, oriental-style lounges, generically referred to by the term "Moorish" and habitually equipped with a fumoir – this room was intended not for social sharing, but for intimate, family enjoyment. The dresser was originally accompanied by a pendant depicting the city of Thebes. The front of the chest is inlaid with a fantastic view of the city of Nineveh, an ancient urban centre located on the left bank of the Tigris in northern Mesopotamia.

The son of a Murano glassmaker, Zecchin attended the Accademia di Venezia, later devoting himself not only to painting but also to the applied arts: from glass to mosaics, from embroidery to tapestries, from furniture to ceramics. In 1912 he began his collaboration with Teodoro Wolf Ferrari, an artist trained within the Munich Secession, with whom he exhibited in Munich in 1913 and at the Venice Biennale in 1914 a series of small plates and Murrini vases made by the Barovier Artists. Dating from the same period is this vase, decorated with murrine, a technique dating back to Roman times that involved the preliminary preparation of a glass rod, composed of concentric layers of dear colours, which was subsequently cut into small segments. This vase is reminiscent of another significant piece of Zecchin's artistic production, preserved at the Wolfsoniana: the black lacquered oak sideboard with gilded carvings depicting fish on a seabed. Oblong coloured glass vase decorated with small spirals and geometric motifs.

Signed on the base, as was the artist's custom, and dated on one of the doors “March 12, 1899,” the cabinet is decorated on the base by figurative elements typical, as in the case of dragonflies, of Bugatti's production, who had already participated in the 1898 National Exhibition in Turin, imposing his unprecedented style through Moorish-style furniture, inlaid and covered with parchment. The cabinet, the casket of which is internally wrapped in velvet, has four doors on the top with corolla openings and a central decoration with embossed copper circles; the base, on the other hand, develops vertically with an architectural structure enriched with naturalistic figurative elements, including dragonflies.

One of the leading students of Otto Wagner's school, which also trained Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann, architect Leopold Bauer, originally from Silesia but working in Vienna, won the 1900 Haus eines Kunstfreundes competition organised by art publisher Alexander Koch, who had founded the magazine Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration in Darmstadt in 1897 . His cabinet is decorated with an inlay depicting a pair of dancers, executed by the Viennese Secessionist painter Maximilian Lenz, which can also be found on the doors of one of his contemporary chests of drawers and, curiously, also appears on a door in the music room designed in 1898 by Joseph Maria Olbrich in the Austrian capital. The walnut and brass cabinet is decorated with a mother-of-pearl, wood and ivory inlay depicting a pair of dancers on each rectangular panel.