The Renaissance - England - Part 9

In the second half of the 16th century it was becoming increasingly common to place the cupboard in the dining room. It was either a structure of three open shelves on carved supports, or a combination of shelves and a cupboard as we know the term today. usually it was of oak, although examples in solid walnut are not unknown.
The open type, known sometimes as a buffet or a court cupboard, usually had three open shelves, the lowest being supported on short block feet. The back supports were plain, being hidden when in use by the display of plate. The front supports were heavily carved in Elizabethan days and much play was made of the huge bulbous shapes which by then were decorating table legs. The Elizabethan oak court cupboard and its later Jacobean descendants are beautiful pieces of handmade furniture much in demand today.

All these types of fitted and non fitted furniture were intended for the display of plate and other items used at meals. In addition there was the livery cupboard, placed in the sleeping quarters and containing refreshments which could be taken after retiring. In order to provide ventilation the front was carved in tracery or pierced with a network of holes through which the air could pass. Some hung on the wall, while others were placed on small stands. Similar food hutches stood in the dining and kitchen quarters of Tudor England. As so often the requirements of the church had a hand in their development for they were widely used for the storage of communion wine and bread.

The Renaissance - England - Part 8

Tables, as well as other forms of handmade furniture, had an important part to play in the advancement to more luxurious styles of living. The chimney corner was taking a place of the open hearth and the large, public hall was giving way to smaller private rooms. Wealth led to the search for privacy and at dining times more intimacy was demanded. The design of the Englishman's table reflected these changes.
Medieval tables had been solid baulks of timber placed on trestles, the whole being removed and stacked against a side wall when the hall had to be cleared for dancing or other purposes. From the beginnings, Tudor England inherited the long refectory table, which had a rectangular top with fixed, simple supports united by four stretchers used as foot rests.

The mid 16th century saw carving appearing on the legs and on the frieze below the table top. Only rarely was there inlay of holly and bog oak. When not in use, the tables were covered with what William Harrison has referred to as 'Turkey work', which was a type of heavy fabric woven with knotted pile in imitation of carpets from Asia Minor and Persia. Similar pieces continued to be used as table coverings and drapes for chair backs and seats until well into the 17th century.
Table legs were carved in baluster form or bulbous shapes, the latter being of enormous proportions in Elizabeth's time and giving oak tables of that period a very distinctive appearance.
Expanding tables, non fitted furniture, appeared in Italy and France and then England early in the 16th century, the draw-top being among the commonest. Later came centre-opening tables and towards the close of the century, the new, more intimate living styles produced the drop-leaf type. Also introduced was the gate-leg table, a species which, however, has more in common with Stuart times than Tudor. Side tables were extremely rare, the buffet and court cupboard fulfilling the function of serving surfaces.

In all the new variations of the table, the carver of Elizabethan England was finding new and exciting opportunities to show off his talents. The vase-shaped and massively bulbous legs showed Flemish and German origin. On rare occasions mythical beasts formed the supports of tables. An elaborate, draw-top table from around 1600, now in private collection, has intricately carved supports of winged monsters to which lion cubs have been added on the four corners at floor level. In the Burrell Collection of the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum there is an oak hall table bearing the typical six legs of bulbous form and sporting a very 'avant garde' set of claw like feet which predate the claw and ball foot by well over a century. Elizabethan exploration was not limited to seagoing ventures in gold-laden hemispheres.

Nowhere was 16th century experiment and change more apparent from the cabinet-makers point of view than in the making of storage furniture, which was used as an adjunct to the dining table and the bed chamber. As before, the church had played an important role. The cupboard of today owes its early development to a very large degree to ecclesiastical requirements and usages. A board for cups was originally an open structure of shelves. The idea of a closed structure, to which access was by a door or doors in the front, was expressed in the French term 'armoire'.
Differing and sometimes quite arbitrary translations have helped confuse the issue and early invoices and household accounts juggle with such words as ambry, aumbry, aumbrie, cupboard, book-presse, and press. The French dressoir, denoting a closed cupboard on a stand, gives us the dresser which developed from Jacobean origins in Britain.

The word aumbry was most frequently used for a type of wardrobe before Tudor times. It has several compartments with hinged doors and was used in churches as a safe. In a bewildering variety of spellings, a nunnery at Boston in Lincolnshire recorded in a 1534 inventory 'a playne arombry' with 'two lockes' for altar utensils, which a Durham monastery had 'almeryes of fine wenscote (boarding) being varnished and finely painted and guilted finely over with little images, very seemly and beautiful to behold, for the Reliques belonging to Saint Cuthbert to lye in'. Such pieces continued to be used in churches for books, vestments and relics until the Reformation, after which they gained a wider domestic use.

The Renaissance - England - Part 7

The 'turned' chair was the third type which made enormous strides in design during the century and became the basic form of seating in Elizabethan England. It was constructed of separate pieces, socketed together and the turning was of the knobbed or ringed variety. Its construction had become more open and the seat was usually of ample dimensions to take the voluminous clothing of the time.
Frequently it had a raked back for comfort and embodied four plain, stout stretchers. These were now about two inches above the floor, earlier stretchers having been at floor level. Originally designed as a foot rest and a protection from the cold of stone floors whose only covering would have been rushes, stretchers were gradually raised as carpets became more prevalent.

By the 17th century the function of stretchers as foot rests had disappeared completely and they remained as essential units of construction and vehicles for decoration. The discerning collector knows that the faker, using reproduction furniture techniques, can never successfully reproduce the scuffed, worn look of early oak stretchers, caused by the feet of generations; stools and chairs, benches and forms sold as examples of 15th and 16th century oak handmade furniture are immediately suspect if the stretchers present a telltale unused appearance.

A common feature of chairs was their display of two turned legs at the front and plain ones at the back. There are records of many with triangular seats, a style which continued into the 17th century, and often sloping arms swept down from the top corners of the back. All chairs had loose cushions; upholstered chairs began to appear late in Elizabeth's reign, although strictly this was a development of the 17th century. A contemporary observer wrote in 1597 that 'the fashion of cushioned chairs is taken up in every merchants house'. Large cushions, satin embroidered and edged with gold or silver lace, were used extensively for window seats in Elizabethan mansions.

Clues to everyday life in Elizabethan times have come down to us through invoices, household books and, frequently, from contemporary diarists. A prolific writer was William Harrison, topographer, chronologist, parson and scholar (1534 - 1593), who, in The Description of England, had ranged over a wide variety of topics. On the subject of domestic life-styles in the steadily prospering upper and middle class society of England he is at his most enlightening - he wrote:

The furniture of our houses also exceedeth and is grown in manner even to passing delicacy: and herein i do not speak of the nobility and gentry only, but likewise of the lowest sort in most places of our south country that have anything at all to take to. Certes in noblemen's houses it is not rare to see abundance of arras, rich hangings of tapestry, silver vessel and so much other plate as many furnish sundry cupboards to the sum oftentimes of a thousand or two thousand pounds at the least, whereby the value of this and and the rest of their stuff doth grow to be almost inestimable. Likewise in the houses of knights, gentlemen, merchantment and some other wealthy citizens it is not geson (rare) to behold generally their great provision of tapestry, Turkey work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and thereto costly cupboards of plate.

Harrison is using the term 'cupboard' - literally cup board - in its widest sense to denote any wooden structure with open display spaces on which to place plate and other utensils. In many Elizabethan inventories to words cupboard, aumbry and press seem to have been interchangeable.
Harrison provides interesting background information about developments in household fashions - many of which affected the progress of fitted and non fitted furniture design - when he touches on the question of glassware. Amid the increasing affluence of the more fortunate classes, glassware was apparently very fashionable, infinitely more fashionable than everyday gold and silver.

tomorrow, to be continued with 'tables'................

The Renaissance - England - Part 6

The settle type of chair has met with mixed fortunes in modern markets. Understandably, anything from the 16th century, which is frequently termed for convenience 'Elizabethan', and pieces from a similarly wide-embracing 'Jacobean' period command a high price. But settles, like some of the chests described in earlier articles, continued to be made throughout successive centuries. They epitomize country handmade furniture and their simple, joined construction offers no great challenge to the unsophisticated carpenter. They belong to the farmhouse kitchen but are equally at home in the country pub.

In a more exalted form, the 'joyned chair' has existed in the 15th century as a canopied piece of great height which stood on a small raised platform in the hall and from which the master could survey his household ranged on benches below. Sometimes they were made to be dismantled and were provided with leather packing cases into which the chair could be placed when the owner travelled from house to house. By the time of the Tudors, this travelling function had necessitated the emergence of a second type of chair, the X-frame, similar in construction to the modern camp stool and of a convenient form which lent itself to campaign and travelling non fitted furniture of wood and metal through several centuries up to the present. Originally of simple construction, with loose cushions provided for comfort, the X-frame was given a new lease of popularity in the mid 16th century, by which time it had developed into a luxurious piece in keeping with the mood of the time.

The woodwork was completely clothed in velvet, damask or silk and the loose cushions rested on a webbing support attached at each side to the rails of the frame. There is evidence of such chairs being provided in numbers for Henry VIII, wide, substantial examples ideally suited to the king's ample girth and weight, and richly fringed with gold silk. In the early years of Elizabeth's reign the court coterie vied with each other by ordering immensely costly examples in emulation of the queen's taste for X-frame chairs. They had frames which were gilded, painted and carved and often revealed the influence of the Italian style.

Winchester cathedral possesses an oak X-frame chair, somewhat bare in its unrestored state, but which once was covered in blue velvet secured with gilt headed nails and capped with metal finials, techniques and parts often used today with reproduction furniture. It dates from around 1550, the decade in which Elizabeth came to the throne. In this traditional form, the X shape is viewable from the front and rear. An oak armchair in the Victoria and Albert Museum, on the other hand, has X-shaped legs at the sides and the whole is meant to fold somewhat like a modern garden chair. It is a very early example of travelling convenience, dating from the turn of the 16th century.

to be continued......

The Renaissance - England - Part 5

When Margaret, daughter of Henry VII, travelled to Scotland to marry James IV in 1503 she attended a prenuptial supper in the course of which she complained that the stool given to her was 'not for her ease', whereupon the king offered her his 'Chayre', clearly the only one in the great hall of the castle.
The anecdote, recorded by the herald who accompanied Margaret, is more than just a tale of royal gallantry. It tells us much about the furnishing styles of the day. While the head of the house sat in the chair (probably the only one), benches, forms and simple joined stools sufficed for the less exalted. However, during the reign of the Tudors, seat furniture, handmade furniture, was to undergo a revolution. Indeed, it was already well under way in England at the time the Scottish James was attempting to show his bride that he could keep her in the manner to which she was accustomed.

In the early years of the 16th century three types of chair were in existence. The first was a simple development of the lidded chest, which was given panelled sides and back to form seating of the settle type but which still retained its box-seat compartment for the storage of linen. A similar natural progression had been witnessed in Italy, home of the Renaissance and many fitted and non fitted furniture innovations, where the massive, elaborately carved chest known as a cassone had been given low arms and a back to become a cassapanca. It was a piece that could seat several persons and though still retaining its chest, the cassapanca now fulfilled the principal function of the settle. It is interesting to note that while sunny Italy opted for low back and arms, the English settle developed a distinctive tall style which offered more comfort and protection in the draughty halls and chambers of northern climes.

The English settle was not, of course, a child of Tudor times. Its origins dated back some two centuries or more. Indeed, the styles of this particular type of seating in the 16th century deviated from the established Gothic only in details of ornamentation. It was translated into a 16th century product through the carver's vocabulary; Tudor roses, scrolls and dolphins, zigzags and interlaced strapwork, as well as linenfold. It was a happy repository for this last style of carving, which was ideally suited to rectilinear forms of Elizabethan examples of such chairs are among the aristocrats of early oak, commanding astronomic prices when (rarely) they appear on the market today.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has an example of a type known as a 'joyned chair', high backed, but with sides at arm level. Italianate Renaissance carving decorates a head panel, but the remainder  of the chair back and the front of the seat are carved in linenfold, the two styles harmonizing perfectly.

to be continued........

The Renaissance - England - Part 4

The panelling of the great halls of the early Tudor period displays these formal linenfold patterns and much of it bears evidence of the influence of a new breed of craftsmen who were being imported from the Continent to teach their English brothers. Peaceful times in England and the growth of domestic refinement required more comfortable surroundings. Royalty had its sumptuous palaces at Windsor and Richmond while elsewhere, feudal castles had given way to mansions which found ready employment for foreign craftsmen, artists and woodcarvers.

In Henry VIII's reign a traditional carving style which was a mixture of both Gothic and classical Renaissance was employed. A notable example of this transitional movement can be seen in the woodwork of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Superb examples of the newly invigorated woodcarvers' skills can also be seen in the Great Hall at Hampton Court. The roof and choir stools of Henry VII's chapel at Westminster Abbey are rich in the new art. Later the Elizabethan carvers took the ribbon decoration of the French and the intricately laced strapwork of the Flemish, and combined them with grotesque figurework - creatures that were half human, half monster - in a distinctive style adapted from foreign ideas.

Italian influence was strong, both directly and indirectly (through movements from the Low Countries, where Italian Renaissance seeds had been quick to flower). In mid-Elizabethen times the country benefited from the flight of Antwerp merchants and their attendant craftsmen who were suffering at the hands of the Duke of Parma.
In Southwark Cathedral, London, there stands a magnificent treasure which owes its existence to the European influx into England during the 16th century. Not only is it yet another example of the church's part in handmade furniture development, but if offers a rare opportunity to examine a piece which represents an important landmark in case furniture design; the transition from the lidded box to the chest of drawers as a storage unit.

What had begun as the Church of St Mary Overie in 1106, probably on the site of an earlier religious establishment, became in 1540 the parish church of St Saviour, and in 1905 the Cathedral of Southwark. In 1588 the church received from Hugh Offley, Lord Mayor of London, and his father-in-law, Richard Harding, a piece of non fitted furniture, an oak chest which stands 99cm high and 198cm wide. The architecturally representative decoration in coloured wood on the front gives the chest its name - Nonsuch.
Nonsuch chests, many of which were made in southern England in the mid to late 16th century, are so named from a corruption of Toto del Nunziata, an Italian artist who was responsible for designs from which Henry VIII had a palace built at Cheam in Surrey. Late 16th century Nonsuch chests usually bore a resemblance in their decoration to the palace's appearance as depicted in contemporary illustrations. The Southwark piece is so decorated and it is believed to have been the work of German immigrant craftsmen, to whom similar chests have also been attributed.

The Southwark chest is on an arcaded stand of probably later date and sports characteristic subsidiary decoration of floral arabesques. But what sets it apart as the harbinger of a new and exciting development in case furniture is the existence of three small drawers in its lower portion. It is without doubt an extremely early example of a chest with drawers, although it is not claimed to be the first or even among the first such examples. Nevertheless chests with drawers did not become common in England for a decade or two after Offley and Harding made their presentation to the church.  

The Renaissance - England - Part 3

Three forms of chest had existed in England before the dawn of the 16th century. In the days of Henry VII (1485 - 1509) they were all still in use and indeed two of them were to be made in their original forms until the early 17th century. Significantly, examples of each type have lasted to the present day, usually in the custody of churches or other ecclesiastical institutions, and are yet another tribute to the durability of stout oak.

The earliest and most crude form is made of a hollowed log, one example of which is it Milton Bryant Church, Bedfordshire. The chest is banded with iron to keep its shape, and it is typical of medieval construction; an oak trunk would be split transversely and the lower section would then be hollowed out and banded; the section first removed would then be employed as the lid.
A later form was the boarded chest, composed of solid front, back and underpart, all of which fitted into ends which became the feet, thus raising it from any damp floor. Examples of these types were made until the early 17th century, although by that time the richer religious houses and the nobility and merchants were enjoying much more sophisticated items of chest furniture which developed with the growth of skilled craftsmanship and foreign influence.

Yet another type was the chest of framed panels, joined together in simple but effective case-work. This type was made for some 300 years until it was relegated to the backwaters of 'country furniture' with the emergence of chests fitted with drawers and of cabinets.

A 16th century Bishop of Chichester, worried about the effect of dampness on archives and vestments, urged the need for regular 'careful examination lest anything should perish by the boxes becoming old, or by the eating of worms, or in any other way'. The importance of boarded chests, raised above the ground on their end boards, was being given wider recognition.

The War of the Roses and the attendant unrest had fostered lawlessness on a grand scale and we have seen how Henry VII, determined to stamp this out, had taken measures to create a more ordered and peaceful life for his people. Yet old habits die hard and the very lawlessness of the age provided another reason why the church became associated with the development of case handmade furniture.

Thievery and mayhem traditionally stopped short of the church doors, and domestic chests, vulnerable to pilfering in private homes, were entrusted to the church's care. There are examples of wills specifying that legacies of valuables such as jewellery should be stores in abbeys on monasteries until the beneficiary came of age. On that date the valuables would be removed, but often the chests which had protected them would be left with the church. Thanks to careful husbandry by church officials through the centuries, these chests exist today as almost the only examples of types then in everyday use, nowadays reproduction furniture techniques are used to try and replicate similar furniture.

Boxes and chests however, were spreading beyond the domain of the church. On record is Henry VIII's passion for boxes or similar, fitted with places for small implements. An inventory of the wardrobe of Catherine of Aragon referred to a 'desk covered with black velvette and garnysshed withe gilt nayles'. Other archives make mention of many boxes.

By the early 1500s the fronts of panelled chests were being divided into two and later three sections, each panel being carved with scenes that were not always of religious origin. Designs of jousting knights for instance, might be used. As the much improving quality of muddle and upper-class life became apparent, the stock of household goods and utensils was growing, demanding special storage space.

Non fitted furniture such as chests were and obvious repository for plate but household linen - hangings, bedsheets and the richer clothes - was a factor increasingly to be considered. carved panelling known as linenfold, executed to represent folds of linen, designated the purpose of many household chests. It was also profusely employed in the panelling of choir stalls and domestic apartments and became a popular feature of interiors decoration throughout Elizabethan times. 

The Renaissance - England - Part 2

There are several reasons for the popularity of oak and the rise in value during the 1970s. Long considered too heavy and cumbersome in modern settings, oak received a fillip from the growth of the 'second home' and 'country cottage' habit. It fitted in with new interior design standards and harmonized with the light Scandinavian look. Interest in oak was also influenced by, as well as itself influencing a boom in collecting pewter, the latter looking best in an oak setting.
In cool and temperate European climates and particularly in North America, where central heating has been found to play havoc with soft-wooden, veneered handmade furniture, oak is liked because it resists the assault of temperature, just as it can resist the onset of time and wear. Above all, as the better furniture of the 18th century became popular with collectors, soared in value and became scarce, oak remained available - and under priced.

Astonishing as it may seem, there are relatively more extant, top quality furniture from the century prior to 1650 than from the century which followed, simply because 'soft' walnut is so vulnerable in comparison with oak. Availability is patently an effective spur to collecting and oak furniture has the advantage of having been produced - by rural but nevertheless highly skilled joiners and cabinet-makers - long after the so called age of oak ended towards the close of the 17th century. Later still, the Gothic revivalists of Victorian times turned to oak, adding to the fund of material available, although some of their work appeals only to certain tastes.

England celebrates in song its traditional 'hearts of oak', but there is more to this than sentimental patriotism and a nostalgic pride in an oak-armoured navy. A strong national element in furniture expressed itself by translating the vivid and decorative forms of the European late Renaissance into staid and simple terms. Changes in thought and living styles take time to spread and the Renaissance affected England much later than Italy or France; English fitted and non fitted furniture retained its natural and somewhat rough character longer than the French. It was as though England had more time to assimilate the results of the flowering of free thought, and ideas were put into practice at a time when social, economic and political changes had created a new background. In much the same manner, American furniture of later times developed in interesting, fresh ways by being subjected to a time lag; this a European furniture style of one decade would be embraced and exploited in the Americas a decade or two later as a result of new climates of social and political feeling.

For England, therefore, the start of the 16th century and the reign of the Tudors marked a dividing line between the Middle Ages and the modern era. Europe was being influenced by the development of Renaissance free thought, education and nationalism - the last being a powerful factor in the progression of each country's furniture styles. Henry VII, intent on unifying the house of York and Lancaster, was equally determined that their respective nobility, sadly debilitated by the Wars of the Roses, should never again wield the power of earlier days. The support he gave to commerce and foreign trade, his good husbandry of national finances and his choice of new men as ministers all helped to cement the allegiance of wealthy merchants, country gentry and yeomen farmers. A new middle class was being born to stimulate and enjoy innovations and improvements in living style. And furniture was at the forefront of this trend.

The affairs of the church dominated English politics during the 16th and part of the 17th centuries. It was the church, too, which had a profound effect on the course of furniture, now antique furniture design and use. In no other area was this more apparent than that of coffers and chests, the earliest examples of case furniture.

The Renaissance - England - Part 1

The story of English furniture in the 16th century is the story of oak, that sturdy, durable, most English of woods, with which the country was richly stocked throughout medieval times thanks to the extensive mature forests which covered the land. The forests served England well, to well, in fact; generations plundered this natural resource with such abandon that consumption outstripped planting.

Oak was used for many purposes, not least handmade furniture. Domestic walnut and elm partially augmented oak, and inlay of holly and bog oak - black-hued wood from ancient trees preserved in peat bogs - was used when the growth of affluence bred the desire for more ornamentation. But it was oak, employed in the solid, that saw the 16th century in, and as the principal material for furniture, it was oak that was still dominant when the Tudors handed over their reign to the Stuarts at the beginning of the 17th century.
There are more than 300 varieties of oak, the English species being 'Quercus robur', the common oak, and 'Quercus sessiliflora', fruited oak. The timber is hard and lasting, its colour varying from brown to white and, as the 17th century diarist and sylviculturist, John Evelyn, observed, it 'will not easily glew to other wood, and not very well to its own kind'. There can be no greater tribute to its durability than the quantity of pieces of oak furniture which have survived, rich with the patina of age, to the present day.

Because mature oaks were felled in huge numbers, Henry VIII was moved to pass a law enforcing the preservation of oak woods. By the middle of Elizabeth's reign England was sufficiently alerted to the drain of its natural heritage that oak planting was widespread. Ironically, by the time these woods reached maturity on hundred years later in the reign of Charles II, the age of walnut was in full flower and oak was soon to be relegated to carcase construction and drawer linings - except in country areas, where it never lost its popularity for any and every type of furniture.

The importance of oak in the history of fitted and non fitted furniture has never been doubted, even by those who have contributed to its denigration as a furnishing material throughout most of the present century. Today, however, oak has regained its esteem among collectors, interior designers and all those who appreciate soundly made, practical and attractive furniture. Oak furniture is also a remarkably strong hedge against inflation; in the 1970s it increased in value at almost twice the average rate of all antique furniture, a rate which showed no sign of slackening in the 1980s.

.......to be continued

Renaissance - Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia (continued)

The furniture of Austria and South Germany is strongly influenced by Italian styles and techniques. Two of the chief centres of production for richly decorated handmade furniture were Augsburg and Nuremberg. A designer named Peter Flotner (c.1485 - 1546) is believed to have trained in the former city and, from 1522, worked in the latter, producing printed designs for pieces decorated with grotesques, arabesques and putti.

At about the same time, a Swiss-born cabinet-maker worked in on or other of these cities. He is now known only by his initials, 'H.S.', which appear on his designs for architectural pieces and on a fine chest dated 1551, now at the Staatliche Museum, Berlin. It is decorated with three intarsia perspectives, typical of the high quality workmanship found frequently on South German examples decorated in this medium.
Melchior von Rheydt of Cologne was another master working at about 1600. A table made at Augsburg in 1626 by Hans Georg Hertel and Lucas Kilian is fitted with a top composed of pietre dure (hard stone), a Florentine technique, often used today with reproduction furniture , of composing a pattern with coloured stones bonded to a marble base with plaster. This table-top is believed to have been made about 1580 by an Italian, Cosima Castrucci, working in Prague. All these pieces demonstrate the ways in which great craftsmen began to work far from home during the Renaissance, and how their products came to be exported and re-employed in distant places.

The 'auricular' or 'lobate' style was a late and eccentric variation on Renaissance and particularly Mannerist themes which affected the carving of some furniture in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland in the mid 17th century. It takes its name, or names, from the strange shapes contrived, resembling human ears, or the lobes of ears. In Dutch, it is called Kwabornament and in German, Knorpelwerk. Its originator was a Dutch silversmith, Paulus van Vianen (c.1568 - 1613) who worked mainly in Munich (1596 - 1601), then at Salzburg and ultimately at Prague (1603 - 1613) and was influenced by Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508 - 1585), the greatest German goldsmith working in the Mannerist style. Jamnitzer's jewel caskets were miniature pieces of fitted and non fitted furniture mounted with caryatid figures and casts of reptiles and insects, a repertoire taken over and developed by van Vianen and his followers for their work in silver, and by Friedrich Unteutsch of Frankfurt-am-Main, for furniture, who published a book of designs c.1650.
These designs, often seen translated into grotesquely carved chair-backs in South Germany and Switzerland, involve grimacing faces, contorted figures, fleshy sea creatures and shellfish. Those who dislike the style are apt to dismiss it as an aberration, a mutation in the evolution of furniture design but it provides a link between the Renaissance and the next major movement, the Baroque.

The Renaissance - Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia

The influence of the Renaissance on German furniture became marked at around the same time as Charles, the Habsburg king of Spain, succeeded his grandfather as German king and head of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519. Impressive though his titles and the extent of his domains appear, the German kingship was little more than an honorary presidency over a number of states governed by princes who were no longer mere feudal lords but sovereigns in their own right, some of whom set up court with pretensions to granduer. The older concept of fealty was undermined by Renaissance thinking, and the religious disturbances brought about by the Reformation disarrayed it even further. All these factors had some bearing on the development of handmade furniture making.

In Northern Germany where Protestantism was strongest, the styles of the Northern Netherlands were influential. Carcase fitted and non fitted furniture, such as the two-stage cupboard and the armoire, displayed carved decoration in which the solid oak ground was often covered with strapwork, animal and human heads and closely packed, scrolling leaf patterns in the manner of Heinrich Aldegrever (d.1561), who worked at Soest in Westphalia, producing woodcuts and engravings that provided wood-workers with patterns for Renaissance ornament. Westphalia - close to France and sometimes adopting French mannerisms - produced a distinctive class of furniture over a long period. Some fine chests of massive, housed construction, decorated with simple carving or left severely plain but for stout iron bands, have survived from the 16th century onwards in quantities large enough to be available to the private collector.

Scandinavia accepted with caution elements of Netherlandish and Germanic Renaissance decoration, applying it with discretion to Romanesque and Gothic forms. The restrained application of Renaissance ornament to Scandinavian furniture resulted in a graciousness not always evident elsewhere in northern Europe in the 16th century.
Shortly after 1600, Franz Pergo of Basle made furniture, which would sometimes now be used in reproduction furniture, carved with Mannerist motifs. Switzerland adopted some styles from Italy and France but the birthplace of Calvin was strongly Protestant and tended to prefer furniture nearer in style to that of the Netherlands and North Germany. A chest with strong Reformation associations is known as the 'Erasmus chest' and is carved with numerous heads in profile, including a portrait medallion of Erasmus himself. It was made around 1539 by Jacob Steiner and Veltin Redner of Basle, where it is still to be seen in the Historisches Museum. the woods used are ash and lime. The wood is a significant factor to be considered when trying to decide on the area where a particular piece was made. Oak was scarce in Southern Europe and the Alpine countries and a variety of other timbers more readily available, were employed instead.

The Renaissance - Spain and Portugal (Continued)

From the 16th century onwards, bracing irons occur on many Spanish tables having splayed trestle supports composed either of turnings or flat members shaped at their edges. Both types are mounted on 'sledge' feet, i.e. lengths of wood of square section which run from back to front at each end of the piece of handmade furniture and with a substantial forward projection. Crude versions of these trestle-ended tables, often in pine or chestnut rather than the walnut found in the finer examples, continued to be made in peasant communities over a very long period and are often difficult, if not impossible, to date with 100% certainty.

Several types of chair are characteristic of the Spanish Renaissance period, but sometimes lead to confusion because they were imitated or adopted in other countries, even in areas outside the wide dominions of the Habsburgs.
The term sillon de fraileros (monk's chair) is applied to an item of non fitted furniture, an armchair with a rather square-looking frame. The legs rest on sledge feet and at the front have a wide stretcher linking them, relieved with pierced or carved decoration. Despite its name, the monk's chair was by no means confined to monastic use, as the secular coats-of-arms sometimes carved on the stretchers testify. The seat and rectangular back were covered either in velvet or finely tooled, coloured and gilded leatherwork called guadamecil, a Moorish speciality, its name deriving from Gadames in Tripolitania. The art was taken up elsewhere, especially in the Netherlands.

Another type of Spanish chair had no arms or upholstery. The seat was of solid wood, and the back was arcaded by the insertion of spindles below a shaped rail, in a way reminiscent of Romanesque decoration. This type - also known, a little confusingly, as a 'monk's chair' - may well have influenced the development of English chairs with arcaded backs made in Derbyshire and Yorkshire in the 17h and early 18th centuries.

There is a type of chest made entirely of iron, with a multiple system of locks, popularly known as an 'armada chest'. Though German, these chests are often wrongly thought of as Spanish.

The Renaissance - Spain and Portugal

Mouldings applied geometrically to panels and draw-fronts (in the style loosely known in England and America as 'Jacobean') probably owe their origin to abstract patterns introduced by Moors and Arabs in the Iberian peninsula which was in many ways, especially in the south from the 8th century to the final defeat of the Moors in 1492, more oriental than western.
The Portuguese added to this existing heritage by the establishment during the reigns of Manuel I (1495-1521) and John III (1521-1527), of settlements and colonies as far to the East as India and Japan, from which handmade furniture including lacquered beds were imported. What little Portuguese furniture survives from the period, taken together with written accounts of it, suggests that these mixed flavours from the Orient were combined during the earlier part of the 16th century with Italian and French Renaissance styles. Later, and especially after Spain and Portugal were technically united under Philip II of Spain in 1580, Spanish and Spanish-Moorish styles probably dominated the output of the Lisbon guild of furniture-makers, which was well established by the mid 16th century when the city was at the height of its wealth and power.

'Arabesque' was the name given to a complex pattern of inlaid scrolls, leaves and tendrils, probably deriving from Saracenic metalwork and forming part of the Spanish-Moorish repertoire of ornament that spread in the 16th century to many other countries, particularly those, like Spain, under Habsburg domination. In Spain, rich from conquests in South America, silver from that source was plentiful and was used for overlaying and inlaying fitted and non fitted furniture with arabesques and other devices. The style known as 'plateresque' (from plata: --silver), is extended to include pieces similarly decorated in other metals. A Moorish  form of inlaid work, closely related to Italian certosina employed ivory or bone for formal, all-over patterns.

Carving was often of a high order, whether following Moorish abstract designs, or figurative Italianate motifs such as portrait medallions which were sometimes carried out in a peculiarly Spanish way by carving them in relief and fret-cutting around the profiles. The medallions were then mounted on a ground of richly coloured velvet previously laid over the foundation. This kind of carved and pierced decoration was often gilded and further embellishment was provided by the addition of elaborate lock-plates, hinges and mounts, sometimes in silver, until economic crises made in necessary in the late 16th century to forbid such extravagance.

This kind of lavish treatment, sometimes used today in reproduction furniture techniques, was accorded most often to a characteristically Spanish prestige piece, the vargueno, a chest with a hinged fall-front that could be used as a writing leaf and which, when lowered, reveals an elaborate fitment of small drawers. Frequently the top of the vargueno also opens. A version without the fall-front, in which the draws are permanently exposed, is the papileira. Both types were normally supplied with stands, which take two main forms - one is the taquillion, essentially a chest of drawers often with geometrically arranged mouldings on the drawer fronts, the other is the pie de puente - a stand with trestle-ends for legs, strengthened either with a stretcher at the base and a line of turned uprights along it, or with a pair of finely-wrought bracing irons.

to be continued........