Table Cabinet (Contador)

Colonial Spanish American rooms often contained two or three stacked cabinets and writing desks like the ones seen here. Bufetes, or side tables, sometimes draped with velvet covers with gold fringes and tassels, would serve as bases for these towers of luxury. A religious image or a precious object such as an ivory sculpture would crown the furniture.

The vertical arrangement of elite objects in Spanish and Spanish American reception rooms is documented in both Baroque prints and colonial American inventories. The 1710 Lima inventory of the estate of the wealthy Spanish viceroy of Peru, the marquis de Castelldosrius, lists “two desks covered with tortoise shell, ivory, and mother-of-pearl with two other similar, but smaller, desks and their two side tables with two borders of the same.”