The Renaissance - England - Part 3

Three forms of chest had existed in England before the dawn of the 16th century. In the days of Henry VII (1485 - 1509) they were all still in use and indeed two of them were to be made in their original forms until the early 17th century. Significantly, examples of each type have lasted to the present day, usually in the custody of churches or other ecclesiastical institutions, and are yet another tribute to the durability of stout oak.

The earliest and most crude form is made of a hollowed log, one example of which is it Milton Bryant Church, Bedfordshire. The chest is banded with iron to keep its shape, and it is typical of medieval construction; an oak trunk would be split transversely and the lower section would then be hollowed out and banded; the section first removed would then be employed as the lid.
A later form was the boarded chest, composed of solid front, back and underpart, all of which fitted into ends which became the feet, thus raising it from any damp floor. Examples of these types were made until the early 17th century, although by that time the richer religious houses and the nobility and merchants were enjoying much more sophisticated items of chest furniture which developed with the growth of skilled craftsmanship and foreign influence.

Yet another type was the chest of framed panels, joined together in simple but effective case-work. This type was made for some 300 years until it was relegated to the backwaters of 'country furniture' with the emergence of chests fitted with drawers and of cabinets.

A 16th century Bishop of Chichester, worried about the effect of dampness on archives and vestments, urged the need for regular 'careful examination lest anything should perish by the boxes becoming old, or by the eating of worms, or in any other way'. The importance of boarded chests, raised above the ground on their end boards, was being given wider recognition.

The War of the Roses and the attendant unrest had fostered lawlessness on a grand scale and we have seen how Henry VII, determined to stamp this out, had taken measures to create a more ordered and peaceful life for his people. Yet old habits die hard and the very lawlessness of the age provided another reason why the church became associated with the development of case handmade furniture.

Thievery and mayhem traditionally stopped short of the church doors, and domestic chests, vulnerable to pilfering in private homes, were entrusted to the church's care. There are examples of wills specifying that legacies of valuables such as jewellery should be stores in abbeys on monasteries until the beneficiary came of age. On that date the valuables would be removed, but often the chests which had protected them would be left with the church. Thanks to careful husbandry by church officials through the centuries, these chests exist today as almost the only examples of types then in everyday use, nowadays reproduction furniture techniques are used to try and replicate similar furniture.

Boxes and chests however, were spreading beyond the domain of the church. On record is Henry VIII's passion for boxes or similar, fitted with places for small implements. An inventory of the wardrobe of Catherine of Aragon referred to a 'desk covered with black velvette and garnysshed withe gilt nayles'. Other archives make mention of many boxes.

By the early 1500s the fronts of panelled chests were being divided into two and later three sections, each panel being carved with scenes that were not always of religious origin. Designs of jousting knights for instance, might be used. As the much improving quality of muddle and upper-class life became apparent, the stock of household goods and utensils was growing, demanding special storage space.

Non fitted furniture such as chests were and obvious repository for plate but household linen - hangings, bedsheets and the richer clothes - was a factor increasingly to be considered. carved panelling known as linenfold, executed to represent folds of linen, designated the purpose of many household chests. It was also profusely employed in the panelling of choir stalls and domestic apartments and became a popular feature of interiors decoration throughout Elizabethan times. 

The Renaissance - England - Part 2

There are several reasons for the popularity of oak and the rise in value during the 1970s. Long considered too heavy and cumbersome in modern settings, oak received a fillip from the growth of the 'second home' and 'country cottage' habit. It fitted in with new interior design standards and harmonized with the light Scandinavian look. Interest in oak was also influenced by, as well as itself influencing a boom in collecting pewter, the latter looking best in an oak setting.
In cool and temperate European climates and particularly in North America, where central heating has been found to play havoc with soft-wooden, veneered handmade furniture, oak is liked because it resists the assault of temperature, just as it can resist the onset of time and wear. Above all, as the better furniture of the 18th century became popular with collectors, soared in value and became scarce, oak remained available - and under priced.

Astonishing as it may seem, there are relatively more extant, top quality furniture from the century prior to 1650 than from the century which followed, simply because 'soft' walnut is so vulnerable in comparison with oak. Availability is patently an effective spur to collecting and oak furniture has the advantage of having been produced - by rural but nevertheless highly skilled joiners and cabinet-makers - long after the so called age of oak ended towards the close of the 17th century. Later still, the Gothic revivalists of Victorian times turned to oak, adding to the fund of material available, although some of their work appeals only to certain tastes.

England celebrates in song its traditional 'hearts of oak', but there is more to this than sentimental patriotism and a nostalgic pride in an oak-armoured navy. A strong national element in furniture expressed itself by translating the vivid and decorative forms of the European late Renaissance into staid and simple terms. Changes in thought and living styles take time to spread and the Renaissance affected England much later than Italy or France; English fitted and non fitted furniture retained its natural and somewhat rough character longer than the French. It was as though England had more time to assimilate the results of the flowering of free thought, and ideas were put into practice at a time when social, economic and political changes had created a new background. In much the same manner, American furniture of later times developed in interesting, fresh ways by being subjected to a time lag; this a European furniture style of one decade would be embraced and exploited in the Americas a decade or two later as a result of new climates of social and political feeling.

For England, therefore, the start of the 16th century and the reign of the Tudors marked a dividing line between the Middle Ages and the modern era. Europe was being influenced by the development of Renaissance free thought, education and nationalism - the last being a powerful factor in the progression of each country's furniture styles. Henry VII, intent on unifying the house of York and Lancaster, was equally determined that their respective nobility, sadly debilitated by the Wars of the Roses, should never again wield the power of earlier days. The support he gave to commerce and foreign trade, his good husbandry of national finances and his choice of new men as ministers all helped to cement the allegiance of wealthy merchants, country gentry and yeomen farmers. A new middle class was being born to stimulate and enjoy innovations and improvements in living style. And furniture was at the forefront of this trend.

The affairs of the church dominated English politics during the 16th and part of the 17th centuries. It was the church, too, which had a profound effect on the course of furniture, now antique furniture design and use. In no other area was this more apparent than that of coffers and chests, the earliest examples of case furniture.

The Renaissance - England - Part 1

The story of English furniture in the 16th century is the story of oak, that sturdy, durable, most English of woods, with which the country was richly stocked throughout medieval times thanks to the extensive mature forests which covered the land. The forests served England well, to well, in fact; generations plundered this natural resource with such abandon that consumption outstripped planting.

Oak was used for many purposes, not least handmade furniture. Domestic walnut and elm partially augmented oak, and inlay of holly and bog oak - black-hued wood from ancient trees preserved in peat bogs - was used when the growth of affluence bred the desire for more ornamentation. But it was oak, employed in the solid, that saw the 16th century in, and as the principal material for furniture, it was oak that was still dominant when the Tudors handed over their reign to the Stuarts at the beginning of the 17th century.
There are more than 300 varieties of oak, the English species being 'Quercus robur', the common oak, and 'Quercus sessiliflora', fruited oak. The timber is hard and lasting, its colour varying from brown to white and, as the 17th century diarist and sylviculturist, John Evelyn, observed, it 'will not easily glew to other wood, and not very well to its own kind'. There can be no greater tribute to its durability than the quantity of pieces of oak furniture which have survived, rich with the patina of age, to the present day.

Because mature oaks were felled in huge numbers, Henry VIII was moved to pass a law enforcing the preservation of oak woods. By the middle of Elizabeth's reign England was sufficiently alerted to the drain of its natural heritage that oak planting was widespread. Ironically, by the time these woods reached maturity on hundred years later in the reign of Charles II, the age of walnut was in full flower and oak was soon to be relegated to carcase construction and drawer linings - except in country areas, where it never lost its popularity for any and every type of furniture.

The importance of oak in the history of fitted and non fitted furniture has never been doubted, even by those who have contributed to its denigration as a furnishing material throughout most of the present century. Today, however, oak has regained its esteem among collectors, interior designers and all those who appreciate soundly made, practical and attractive furniture. Oak furniture is also a remarkably strong hedge against inflation; in the 1970s it increased in value at almost twice the average rate of all antique furniture, a rate which showed no sign of slackening in the 1980s.

.......to be continued

Renaissance - Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia (continued)

The furniture of Austria and South Germany is strongly influenced by Italian styles and techniques. Two of the chief centres of production for richly decorated handmade furniture were Augsburg and Nuremberg. A designer named Peter Flotner (c.1485 - 1546) is believed to have trained in the former city and, from 1522, worked in the latter, producing printed designs for pieces decorated with grotesques, arabesques and putti.

At about the same time, a Swiss-born cabinet-maker worked in on or other of these cities. He is now known only by his initials, 'H.S.', which appear on his designs for architectural pieces and on a fine chest dated 1551, now at the Staatliche Museum, Berlin. It is decorated with three intarsia perspectives, typical of the high quality workmanship found frequently on South German examples decorated in this medium.
Melchior von Rheydt of Cologne was another master working at about 1600. A table made at Augsburg in 1626 by Hans Georg Hertel and Lucas Kilian is fitted with a top composed of pietre dure (hard stone), a Florentine technique, often used today with reproduction furniture , of composing a pattern with coloured stones bonded to a marble base with plaster. This table-top is believed to have been made about 1580 by an Italian, Cosima Castrucci, working in Prague. All these pieces demonstrate the ways in which great craftsmen began to work far from home during the Renaissance, and how their products came to be exported and re-employed in distant places.

The 'auricular' or 'lobate' style was a late and eccentric variation on Renaissance and particularly Mannerist themes which affected the carving of some furniture in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland in the mid 17th century. It takes its name, or names, from the strange shapes contrived, resembling human ears, or the lobes of ears. In Dutch, it is called Kwabornament and in German, Knorpelwerk. Its originator was a Dutch silversmith, Paulus van Vianen (c.1568 - 1613) who worked mainly in Munich (1596 - 1601), then at Salzburg and ultimately at Prague (1603 - 1613) and was influenced by Wenzel Jamnitzer (1508 - 1585), the greatest German goldsmith working in the Mannerist style. Jamnitzer's jewel caskets were miniature pieces of fitted and non fitted furniture mounted with caryatid figures and casts of reptiles and insects, a repertoire taken over and developed by van Vianen and his followers for their work in silver, and by Friedrich Unteutsch of Frankfurt-am-Main, for furniture, who published a book of designs c.1650.
These designs, often seen translated into grotesquely carved chair-backs in South Germany and Switzerland, involve grimacing faces, contorted figures, fleshy sea creatures and shellfish. Those who dislike the style are apt to dismiss it as an aberration, a mutation in the evolution of furniture design but it provides a link between the Renaissance and the next major movement, the Baroque.

The Renaissance - Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia

The influence of the Renaissance on German furniture became marked at around the same time as Charles, the Habsburg king of Spain, succeeded his grandfather as German king and head of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519. Impressive though his titles and the extent of his domains appear, the German kingship was little more than an honorary presidency over a number of states governed by princes who were no longer mere feudal lords but sovereigns in their own right, some of whom set up court with pretensions to granduer. The older concept of fealty was undermined by Renaissance thinking, and the religious disturbances brought about by the Reformation disarrayed it even further. All these factors had some bearing on the development of handmade furniture making.

In Northern Germany where Protestantism was strongest, the styles of the Northern Netherlands were influential. Carcase fitted and non fitted furniture, such as the two-stage cupboard and the armoire, displayed carved decoration in which the solid oak ground was often covered with strapwork, animal and human heads and closely packed, scrolling leaf patterns in the manner of Heinrich Aldegrever (d.1561), who worked at Soest in Westphalia, producing woodcuts and engravings that provided wood-workers with patterns for Renaissance ornament. Westphalia - close to France and sometimes adopting French mannerisms - produced a distinctive class of furniture over a long period. Some fine chests of massive, housed construction, decorated with simple carving or left severely plain but for stout iron bands, have survived from the 16th century onwards in quantities large enough to be available to the private collector.

Scandinavia accepted with caution elements of Netherlandish and Germanic Renaissance decoration, applying it with discretion to Romanesque and Gothic forms. The restrained application of Renaissance ornament to Scandinavian furniture resulted in a graciousness not always evident elsewhere in northern Europe in the 16th century.
Shortly after 1600, Franz Pergo of Basle made furniture, which would sometimes now be used in reproduction furniture, carved with Mannerist motifs. Switzerland adopted some styles from Italy and France but the birthplace of Calvin was strongly Protestant and tended to prefer furniture nearer in style to that of the Netherlands and North Germany. A chest with strong Reformation associations is known as the 'Erasmus chest' and is carved with numerous heads in profile, including a portrait medallion of Erasmus himself. It was made around 1539 by Jacob Steiner and Veltin Redner of Basle, where it is still to be seen in the Historisches Museum. the woods used are ash and lime. The wood is a significant factor to be considered when trying to decide on the area where a particular piece was made. Oak was scarce in Southern Europe and the Alpine countries and a variety of other timbers more readily available, were employed instead.

The Renaissance - Spain and Portugal (Continued)

From the 16th century onwards, bracing irons occur on many Spanish tables having splayed trestle supports composed either of turnings or flat members shaped at their edges. Both types are mounted on 'sledge' feet, i.e. lengths of wood of square section which run from back to front at each end of the piece of handmade furniture and with a substantial forward projection. Crude versions of these trestle-ended tables, often in pine or chestnut rather than the walnut found in the finer examples, continued to be made in peasant communities over a very long period and are often difficult, if not impossible, to date with 100% certainty.

Several types of chair are characteristic of the Spanish Renaissance period, but sometimes lead to confusion because they were imitated or adopted in other countries, even in areas outside the wide dominions of the Habsburgs.
The term sillon de fraileros (monk's chair) is applied to an item of non fitted furniture, an armchair with a rather square-looking frame. The legs rest on sledge feet and at the front have a wide stretcher linking them, relieved with pierced or carved decoration. Despite its name, the monk's chair was by no means confined to monastic use, as the secular coats-of-arms sometimes carved on the stretchers testify. The seat and rectangular back were covered either in velvet or finely tooled, coloured and gilded leatherwork called guadamecil, a Moorish speciality, its name deriving from Gadames in Tripolitania. The art was taken up elsewhere, especially in the Netherlands.

Another type of Spanish chair had no arms or upholstery. The seat was of solid wood, and the back was arcaded by the insertion of spindles below a shaped rail, in a way reminiscent of Romanesque decoration. This type - also known, a little confusingly, as a 'monk's chair' - may well have influenced the development of English chairs with arcaded backs made in Derbyshire and Yorkshire in the 17h and early 18th centuries.

There is a type of chest made entirely of iron, with a multiple system of locks, popularly known as an 'armada chest'. Though German, these chests are often wrongly thought of as Spanish.

The Renaissance - Spain and Portugal

Mouldings applied geometrically to panels and draw-fronts (in the style loosely known in England and America as 'Jacobean') probably owe their origin to abstract patterns introduced by Moors and Arabs in the Iberian peninsula which was in many ways, especially in the south from the 8th century to the final defeat of the Moors in 1492, more oriental than western.
The Portuguese added to this existing heritage by the establishment during the reigns of Manuel I (1495-1521) and John III (1521-1527), of settlements and colonies as far to the East as India and Japan, from which handmade furniture including lacquered beds were imported. What little Portuguese furniture survives from the period, taken together with written accounts of it, suggests that these mixed flavours from the Orient were combined during the earlier part of the 16th century with Italian and French Renaissance styles. Later, and especially after Spain and Portugal were technically united under Philip II of Spain in 1580, Spanish and Spanish-Moorish styles probably dominated the output of the Lisbon guild of furniture-makers, which was well established by the mid 16th century when the city was at the height of its wealth and power.

'Arabesque' was the name given to a complex pattern of inlaid scrolls, leaves and tendrils, probably deriving from Saracenic metalwork and forming part of the Spanish-Moorish repertoire of ornament that spread in the 16th century to many other countries, particularly those, like Spain, under Habsburg domination. In Spain, rich from conquests in South America, silver from that source was plentiful and was used for overlaying and inlaying fitted and non fitted furniture with arabesques and other devices. The style known as 'plateresque' (from plata: --silver), is extended to include pieces similarly decorated in other metals. A Moorish  form of inlaid work, closely related to Italian certosina employed ivory or bone for formal, all-over patterns.

Carving was often of a high order, whether following Moorish abstract designs, or figurative Italianate motifs such as portrait medallions which were sometimes carried out in a peculiarly Spanish way by carving them in relief and fret-cutting around the profiles. The medallions were then mounted on a ground of richly coloured velvet previously laid over the foundation. This kind of carved and pierced decoration was often gilded and further embellishment was provided by the addition of elaborate lock-plates, hinges and mounts, sometimes in silver, until economic crises made in necessary in the late 16th century to forbid such extravagance.

This kind of lavish treatment, sometimes used today in reproduction furniture techniques, was accorded most often to a characteristically Spanish prestige piece, the vargueno, a chest with a hinged fall-front that could be used as a writing leaf and which, when lowered, reveals an elaborate fitment of small drawers. Frequently the top of the vargueno also opens. A version without the fall-front, in which the draws are permanently exposed, is the papileira. Both types were normally supplied with stands, which take two main forms - one is the taquillion, essentially a chest of drawers often with geometrically arranged mouldings on the drawer fronts, the other is the pie de puente - a stand with trestle-ends for legs, strengthened either with a stretcher at the base and a line of turned uprights along it, or with a pair of finely-wrought bracing irons.

to be continued........