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.