The Renaissance - France

French architecture, interior decoration and furniture - even the best - remained Gothic in spirit until the end of the 15th century, with cautious and uncertain borrowings of Renaissance ornament applied, often incongruously, to traditional forms. Italian cabinet work was much admired and imported by nobles who had seen it during military excursions.
Francois I, King of France, was defeated and taken prisoner at the Battle of Pavia (1525) and to secure his release had to cede Burgundy and to give up the Italian territories he had previously claimed. This did not discourage him in the least from creating a magnificent palace and centre of culture at Fontainebleau where French and Italian talents combined to establish what is now known as the Francois I Style, or First Renaissance in France.

The palatial fashions of Fontainebleau gradually came to influence the handmade furniture of the people throughout the 16th century, when a middle class comprised of tradesmen, farmers and merchants was creating homes for itself. During the first half of the 16th century, the variety of shapes and types of furniture did not greatly increase. The craftsman working at a modest level continued to produce coffers of the old kind, but decorated them with architectural pilasters dividing the panels. These were carved with isolated classical figures or, more often, with portrait medallions in profile, the later sometimes attempts at portraying the owner and his wife. The dresser also maintained a Gothic form, with the cupboard above an open space and with arched or column supports. The carving again employs Renaissance motifs, sometimes in combination with linenfold panels.

A fresh treatment of the Renaissance idiom developed early in the next reign, which together with the two subsequent reigns covers the period called the Henri II Style, or High Renaissance in France spanning the years 1547 to 1589. A group of designers and craftsmen who had worked at Fontainebleau set out with the deliberate intention of creating a national style but the result was that while the visual language of the Renaissance remained basically Italian, only the accent was French.

Best remembered of these rebels is Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau the elder (c.1520-1584), a designer who published the first French book of furniture designs about 1550. There is not a single piece of fitted or non fitted furniture in existence which entirely follows even one of his designs, the closest being a table at Hardwick Hall in England, which conforms at least partially to the published drawing.

Between these two limits of excess and purity there exist pieces of furniture, now reproduction furniture, numerous enough for examples to appear quite frequently on the open market, and which are of sensible, practical shapes, architecturally conceived, and are profusely carved with Mannerist subjects - though not in a way calculated to frighten anyone nervous.