Indian Pietra Dura Table Top with Fruit Motif

Fruit and birds, cut from stone, on a ground as black as a closed piano.

This pietra dura table top with fruit motif comes from Rajasthan, India, and is contemporary, made as a hardstone mosaic. Inlaying cut stone flourished under the Mughals, who used it to ornament palaces and tombs, most famously the Taj Mahal, and Indian workshops still make tops like this for tables in homes. A bouquet of fruit and flowers fills the center of a black ground, inside a panel outlined in blue. Scrolls and palmette fans flank it, while birds and trailing stems occupy the corners. A red-brown line frames the whole. Forty-eight inches long and 24 deep.

Set a glass down here and you will hear about it.