The Invisible Service: the Mathematical Table of the Casina Cinese in Palermo / Carlo Vivirito
In the second half of the eighteenth century, the rivalry among European courts in furnishing their residences with astonishing mechanical devices found one of its most refined expressions in the “flying table”: a device designed to guarantee diners a genuinely private meal by removing all physical presence of servants from the room. This paper reconstructs the genealogy and technical physiognomy of the Tavola Matematica of the Casina Cinese in Palermo, built in 1800 for the Bourbon court under the direction of architect Venanzio Marvuglia.
Drawing on unpublished or little-known archival sources — from Léon Dufourny's Diary of a French Architect to Marvuglia's own technical report (1799) and payment records for the Palermitan craftsmen — the paper traces the links between the Sicilian table and its European models: the table of Choisy-le-Roi, the never-realised Petit Trianon project, the Lunéville example, and above all the Italian prototype at Carditello.
Particular attention is paid to the geometric construction of the tabletop, designed by Marvuglia according to the rule for oval figures, and to the silent communication system linking diners to the servants below, based on a code of coloured ribbons — a solution that appears to distinguish the Palermo example from other contemporary European automata.
The Tavola Matematica is today one of the very few surviving examples to retain its entire wooden and mechanical structure intact, a circumstance that makes comparison with other surviving automata, first among them the mechanism at Český Krumlov Castle, particularly fruitful — a comparison to which the closing part of the talk will be devoted.