IAN WARDROPPER: I’m Ian Wardropper, Chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. If you're a frequent visitor to The Met, you may have passed this table without realizing its significance. Look first at the materials. Curator Wolfram Koeppe.

WOLFRAM KOEPPE: You see on the top of the table two enormous Egyptian alabaster slabs, which most likely were excavated or taken from an ancient Roman building, but even the Romans were known for taking those things as spoils from Egypt, so they may have been reused two, three, or four times until they ended up in this beautiful tabletop.

IAN WARDROPPER: The table is a distillation of the ancient world, both in its materials and in its design. The marbles come from Roman sources, and so do the motifs, for instance, the abstracted shield shapes, or peltae, in the border. Renaissance artists saw themselves as rivaling with the ancients and striving to surpass them. So this table represents both an homage to antiquity and a triumph over it.

The table top is a brilliant example of pietre dure, that is, work in colored hardstones, often assembled into a mosaic like this one. Pietre dure of this kind was especially prized in the late Renaissance, when this table was made for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. It stood in the center of a grand room in his palace, among outstanding works of classical statuary and paintings of his own day. Imagine the moment when the table first arrived there: it weighs some thirty thousand pounds, and even today, it takes twelve men and several days to move it. In the Palazzo Farnese, the table was treated as the treasure that it is—an inventory tells us that whenever the Cardinal was away, it was covered with leather and encased in a wooden box with a padlock and chain.