Much Italian furniture that was made in the French manner of the Louis XIV period is very ornate and is inclined to retain Rococo elements, such as asymmetrical flourishes in carved decoration. For the middle-class home, chairs were being produced in the 1780s and 1790s, particularly in Naples, but also in Florence and Venice, which show the open shield backs favoured by London cabinet-makers at the time.
In the country districts, especially Tuscany, some excellent furniture was made along traditional lines, including ladder-back (slat-back) chairs, simple stools and drop leaf tables, usually in solid pine, cypress or walnut. Chairs and chests of this peasant class are sometimes decorated with naive versions of Neoclassical motifs.
A more thoroughly Italian version of Neoclassicism occurred in sophisticated furniture. Slab-ended tables of the type made in ancient Rome, and reproduced during the Renaissance, make another appearance, with tops of marble, porphyry or pietre dure. The sculptural possibilities provided by stands for tables always appealed to the Italian genius, and many were designed by men who were not really members of the furniture trade at all. The sculptor Vincenzo Pacetti supplied, c.1789, 12 supports cast in bronze, all representing Hercules in various poses, for a table designed by Giuseppe Valadier (1762 - 1839) who was one of a family of silversmiths in Rome, but who also worked as an architect and designer.
Giuseppe Maggiolini (1738 - 1814), who began as a carpenter in a monastery and worked in Milan from 1771, is celebrated for his commodes, often made in Paris and following rectilinear shapes. The typical Milanese commode has two drawers with a concealed traverse so that the gap between the upper and lower drawers is all but invisible; it is thus capable of supporting decoration of a pictorial kind - often a Roman portrait or medallion - centred on the front. Maggiolini executed this kind of marquetry on veneered grounds of ebony, satinwood, citruswood and palisander, to name but a few. He is said to have used 85 different kinds of wood in the year 1795, all in their natural, unstained state. Very few pieces are signed by him compared with the vast number attributed to him.
Ignazio Revelli (b.1756) and his son Luigi (b.1776) were natives of Vercelli, in Piedmont. They both settled in Turin and specialised in making the half-round commodes for which that town was noted. Other Turin makers of these commodes largely concentrated on lacquered decoration. The Revellis became famous for pictorial marquetry of a standard second only to that of Maggiolini in Milan. Not content with the hackneyed repertoire of Neoclassical motifs, the Revellis created original designs for their intarsia pictures, and were patronised by the royal family of Sardinia.
Much of the fitted and non fitted furniture made in Turin at the end of the 18th century was decorated with lush carving of foliage, painted and gilded. The leading exponent of this Italian version of the Neoclassical style was Giuseppe Maria Bonzanigo (1745 - 1820), who was born at Asti and settled in Turin in 1773, where he worked for the Sardinian royal family for 20 years and was appointed woodcarver to the Crown in 1787.
His output of console tables and firescreens, bureaux and commodes - mostly for the royal household - provided him with a splendid pretext for lavishly carved fruit, flowers and urns, as well as portrait busts of his patrons, with which his studio was well stocked until Napoleon's army arrived in 1796; being a survivor, Bonzanigo swiftly replaced the existing stock with busts of Napoleon, the Empress and their little son, the King of Rome. He even went so far as to make a tactful alteration to a piece of furniture, replacing a royal portrait with one of the Emperor.
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