The Empire Style - Italy.

Italy
Many important elements of the Empire style, such as a bold use of animal forms for supports, were adopted for luxurious handmade furniture in Italy before they had become fully accepted in France, and continued to be fashionable long after the fall of Napoleon. During the period of the French Empire proper, various members of his family on whom the Emperor had bestowed titles were busy redecorating their new, palatial homes in a manner that would do honour to their august relative. His sister Elisa Baciocchi had a workshop set up in Florence where, under the direction of a craftsmen called Youff, brought for the purpose from Paris, furniture in the Empire style was produced by French cabinet-makers - much of it still to be seen in the Palazzo Pitti, along with that of the most distinguished native Italian cabinet-maker of the period, the Florentine Giovanni Socchi (fl. 1805 - 1815), who was a protege of Elisa's.

Symbolic of Napoleon's military triumphs is a set of marble-topped cylindrical cupboards designed to look like drums and resting on feet formed as pine cones. This drum-like conception occurs again, though less obviously, in a type of desk made by Socchi which, when closed, appears to be an oval table with six very deep drawers side by side, standing on six splayed legs spaced around the perimeter, and one vertical one at the centre. The whole construction stands on an oval plinth. All this opens up to form a writing table and chair, one of the false drawer-fronts being the outside of the chair-back which, when drawn out, reveals the seat resting on two of the splayed legs plus the vertical one. The top of the table divides, the two halves sliding sideways to reveal an extending writing leaf and an inkstand that springs up into position. The entire piece of wizardry is veneered in contrasting dark and light woods and is mounted with lions' heads in gilt bronze. Socchi made and signed at least four of these ingenious novelties.

Pelagio Palagi (1775 - 1860), who was born in Bologna and trained there as a painter, went to Rome to work on the conversion of the Quirinal into a palace for Napoleon in 1806. Deeply imbued with the spirit of Neoclassicism but affected too by the Romantic movement, he was still designing fitted and non fitted furniture in the Empire style for the Palazzo Reale in Turin as late as 1836. This post-Empire manner, with an emphasis on carved and gilded lions and eagles rather than on the severe outlines and flush surfaces of the original style, became the official mode thought suitable for the furnishing of private palaces and public buildings in many parts of Italy during the first half of the 19th century.

Furniture for the middle classes displays some of the same liking for sculptural qualities in carved and applied decoration on tables and chairs especially, but tends more to the solemn manner of the Austrian Biedermeier style for commodes, wardrobes, cylinder-top bureaux and other carcase pieces.