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.