Neoclassicism - Italy - Part 2

Practising what he preached, he designed fitted and non fitted furniture for Cardinal Rezzonico in Venice, 1764 - 1769, some of it Rococo but mostly Neoclassical with a very lavish use of sphinxes, palmettes, lion monopod supports and bucrania (ox sculls). The only surviving examples of furniture carried out exactly to his design are a pair of side-tables, one of which is now at the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts, and the other at the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam. At the time he was working on his designs, relatively little was known about Roman furniture, beyond what was depicted in sculpture; yet some of his designs are remarkably close to pieces subsequently excavated at Pompeii.

Pompeii and Herculaneum - Roman towns not far from Naples - had both been very badly damaged by an earthquake in AD 63, and obliterated by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The ruins of Pompeii were discovered in 1594 - 1600 by Domenico Fontana during the building of an aqueduct, and at various times pieces of sculpture were unearthed from the layers of ashes and loose cinders covering the site.
More careful inspections were made in 1748, and systematic excavations began in 1763. At Herculaneum, the task was much more difficult, as the deposits of ash had been drenched in water at the time of the disaster, causing them to solidify, but work there began in 1738 and continued until 1780, when interest shifted to Pompeii. Publications on the discoveries appeared from 1757 to 1792.

The Pompeiian style, particularly as it was expressed in wall paintings found in ancient buildings, was taken up by many designers internationally, being used not only for interior decoration, but also as a source of inspiration for marquetry and painting on handmade furniture. In the main, 18th century designers interpreted Neoclassicism in the spirit of free adaptation advocated by Piranesi. It was the decorative range of rams' heads, Vitruvian scrolls, urns, lion masks, classical columns, paterae, swags and laurel wreaths that appealed to designers, who at first applied them to the existing Rococo shapes and, a little while later, to more suitable forms. Such forms, however, were not inspired by actual Greek or Roman furniture until a more pedantic approach was made in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

In the earlier approach to Neoclassicism, the general principal was to replace the curvaceous, S-shaped curves and C-scrolls of the Rococo with geometrical contours: rectangles, squares, ovals and circles. The cabriole leg was slow to depart, but was eventually superseded by various vertical types of square or round section, often tapered and sometimes fluted or relieved with delicate carving. Those of round section were turned on a lathe and decoration was provided in the process by breaking the line with protuberances in low relief, frequently no more than a neat ring.

The bombe' commode, so popular in most continental countries (although much less so in England and America), gave way to the 'break-front' form of rectilinear outline, its front having a central portion that projected slightly. A similar plan was sometimes followed for certain other pieces of carcase furniture, for example, the cupboard-bases of bookcases and vitrines. These changes came about very gradually in some places, but quick abruptly in others, depending on a variety of factors, not least of which was the balance achieved between adventurousness and conservatism on the part of both the designer and the customer. This balance varied not only from place to place, but also from one cabinet-maker to another and from one customer to another.