SMALL RECTANGULAR BOX with sloping lid, decorated... Lot 43

SMALL RECTANGULAR BOX with sloping lid, decorated with nine plates in polychrome painted enamel with gold highlights, wooden core and brass frame; invisible counter-enamels. The general theme of the decoration is Children's Games. The sides of the box feature children playing with bacchanals or animals such as rabbits, goats or horses; on each side of the lid, a child holding a foliage scroll next to an urn; on the top plate, a battle of two children between a horseman and an infantryman; on the gables of the lid, trapezoidal in shape, busts of a man and a woman in a garland of laurel leaves surrounded by foliage, on one side Pâris accompanied by the inscription PARIS. LE: P (Paris the Prince), on the other side Helena with HELENA RE[GI]NA (Helen Queen). The background is decorated with a lozenge net and flowers. Inside covered with green wallpaper with gold decoration of fleurs-de-lis and stars with IHS Christic and Marian inscriptions. MARIA. Limoges, workshop of Léonard Limosin or Pierre Reymond, circa 1540 Remounting, probably in the 19th century, of plates from a box on another smaller box from the same period (box with holy oils ?) Height: 10.5 cm - Width: 11 cm - Depth: 8.3 cm (some restorations and wear to the gilding of the enamels, mounting with restorations, transformations and additions) We know about twenty boxes illustrating Children's Games all'antica, probably intended to be offered as gifts on the occasion of a wedding or a birth. One can distinguish several ways among this production from workshops in Limoges. None of them bears a date or a signature and different hypotheses have been put forward about the author(s) of these boxes. One of these manners, presenting a certain awkwardness and stiffness in the attitudes of the children, led the curator Alfred Darcel to recognize in it the "archaism of the drawing" of "Couly I Noailher", an opinion now rejected by Sophie Baratte in her catalogue of the enamels o