The Baroque Era

Italy
Shellfish and other sea-creatures formed an important element in the connection between the auricular style of the late Renaissance and the complex imagery of the Baroque. The word 'Baroque' comes from an Italian word meaning 'irregular pearl', and the oyster shell has a long history as a symbol of beauty and sensuality. It was the container of the pearl itself and the source of mother-of-pearl (a material greatly valued by handmade furniture-makers for inlay work). Aphrodite herself, Greek goddess of love, is often shown rising from the sea-foam (aphros) in a shell.
At the Palazzo Reale, Turin, is a console table dating from around 1680 in carved and gilt wood which depicts a mermaid and a merman with a huge shell between them, putti behind them and a tangled mass of vines around them. Such pieces as this - with or without shells - typify the High Baroque style in Italy, where it had originated and became fully developed by c.1620. When fully expressed, it was a palatial manner, adopted by rich merchants and bankers often to impress their friends and clients and so was confined mainly to rooms used for entertaining. A much simpler, homelier atmosphere existed in those parts of the house reserved for family life. The difference is most clearly seen in the contrast between the elaborately carved thrones, composed almost entirely of scrolls of sculptural features, and the dignified chairs and armchairs with square legs, sometimes relieved with a little turning but always rectilinear in form, their padded seats and backs covered in tapestry, which were made both for the rich in their private quarters and for the not so rich in their homes generally. Both the palatial and the domestic types if Italian fitted and non fitted furniture continued to be made with little change  over a long period.

The simpler type of chair described above was really a continuation of the Renaissance style. Likewise, numerous pieces of handsome if rather provincial-looking furniture such as cupboards and chests continued to be made of walnut throughout the 17th and well into the 18th century, and maintained the earlier traditions of classical proportions and simply carved decoration.
Applied mouldings arranged geometrically, and columns or pilasters of the 'barley sugar' twist type - a characteristic symptom of Baroque restlessness occuring after 1625 - relieved the otherwise austere appearance of many functional pieces.

The greatest master of the sculptural style was Andrea Brustolon (1662 - 1732) who was born in Belluno, an Alpine town long celebrated for the craft of woodcarving, particularly church carving, and to which he eventually returned, taking up again the carving of crucifixes he had learned as a boy. Much of his life was spent in Venice, where he made suites of furniture, now reproduction furniture, such as that produced for the Venier family, now at the Palazzo Rezzonico, which had chairs composed of realistic tree-branches with supports. The fashion spread across Europe. Other skilled exponents of the style in Italy were Domenico and Francesco Stainhart, who in 1678 - 1680 produced a cabinet designed by Carlo Fontana with kneeling statues supporting a piece of architecture in miniature - classical columns flanking drawers faced with delicately carved ivory panels, the whole surmounted by an elaborate pediment.