The flying table at Lunéville
The famous mechanical dining table or table volante is one of the most evocative relics of the lost Court of Lorraine. Both ingenious and, at the same time absurd, it occupies an uncertain imaginative space on the cusp between Baroque love of novelty and the newer 18th-century values of privacy and domesticity.
A "machine pour servir à manger" was first installed by the Duchess Élisabeth-Charlotte as early as 1705-6 in her private dining room in the south wing of the old château, overlooking her kitchen garden.
An ingenious system of beams, pulleys and counterweights allowed the table to be raised and lowered directly into the basement below, where it could be set and cleared out of view. It would disappear seemingly of its own accord and reappear, fully laden, as if by magic. As well as providing a pleasing novelty, this contrivance avoided the intrusion of servants into the intimacy of the private dining room.
The mechanism was probably designed by Philippe Vayringe (1684–1746), known in his lifetime as the ‘Archimedes’ of Lorraine, who was ‘machiniste’ to the Duke (designing, for instance, a hydraulic pump for the gardens at Lunéville), and later professor at the Académie de Lunéville.
