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.

The Renaissance - England - Part 9

In the second half of the 16th century it was becoming increasingly common to place the cupboard in the dining room. It was either a structure of three open shelves on carved supports, or a combination of shelves and a cupboard as we know the term today. usually it was of oak, although examples in solid walnut are not unknown.
The open type, known sometimes as a buffet or a court cupboard, usually had three open shelves, the lowest being supported on short block feet. The back supports were plain, being hidden when in use by the display of plate. The front supports were heavily carved in Elizabethan days and much play was made of the huge bulbous shapes which by then were decorating table legs. The Elizabethan oak court cupboard and its later Jacobean descendants are beautiful pieces of handmade furniture much in demand today.

All these types of fitted and non fitted furniture were intended for the display of plate and other items used at meals. In addition there was the livery cupboard, placed in the sleeping quarters and containing refreshments which could be taken after retiring. In order to provide ventilation the front was carved in tracery or pierced with a network of holes through which the air could pass. Some hung on the wall, while others were placed on small stands. Similar food hutches stood in the dining and kitchen quarters of Tudor England. As so often the requirements of the church had a hand in their development for they were widely used for the storage of communion wine and bread.

The Renaissance - England - Part 8

Tables, as well as other forms of handmade furniture, had an important part to play in the advancement to more luxurious styles of living. The chimney corner was taking a place of the open hearth and the large, public hall was giving way to smaller private rooms. Wealth led to the search for privacy and at dining times more intimacy was demanded. The design of the Englishman's table reflected these changes.
Medieval tables had been solid baulks of timber placed on trestles, the whole being removed and stacked against a side wall when the hall had to be cleared for dancing or other purposes. From the beginnings, Tudor England inherited the long refectory table, which had a rectangular top with fixed, simple supports united by four stretchers used as foot rests.

The mid 16th century saw carving appearing on the legs and on the frieze below the table top. Only rarely was there inlay of holly and bog oak. When not in use, the tables were covered with what William Harrison has referred to as 'Turkey work', which was a type of heavy fabric woven with knotted pile in imitation of carpets from Asia Minor and Persia. Similar pieces continued to be used as table coverings and drapes for chair backs and seats until well into the 17th century.
Table legs were carved in baluster form or bulbous shapes, the latter being of enormous proportions in Elizabeth's time and giving oak tables of that period a very distinctive appearance.
Expanding tables, non fitted furniture, appeared in Italy and France and then England early in the 16th century, the draw-top being among the commonest. Later came centre-opening tables and towards the close of the century, the new, more intimate living styles produced the drop-leaf type. Also introduced was the gate-leg table, a species which, however, has more in common with Stuart times than Tudor. Side tables were extremely rare, the buffet and court cupboard fulfilling the function of serving surfaces.

In all the new variations of the table, the carver of Elizabethan England was finding new and exciting opportunities to show off his talents. The vase-shaped and massively bulbous legs showed Flemish and German origin. On rare occasions mythical beasts formed the supports of tables. An elaborate, draw-top table from around 1600, now in private collection, has intricately carved supports of winged monsters to which lion cubs have been added on the four corners at floor level. In the Burrell Collection of the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum there is an oak hall table bearing the typical six legs of bulbous form and sporting a very 'avant garde' set of claw like feet which predate the claw and ball foot by well over a century. Elizabethan exploration was not limited to seagoing ventures in gold-laden hemispheres.

Nowhere was 16th century experiment and change more apparent from the cabinet-makers point of view than in the making of storage furniture, which was used as an adjunct to the dining table and the bed chamber. As before, the church had played an important role. The cupboard of today owes its early development to a very large degree to ecclesiastical requirements and usages. A board for cups was originally an open structure of shelves. The idea of a closed structure, to which access was by a door or doors in the front, was expressed in the French term 'armoire'.
Differing and sometimes quite arbitrary translations have helped confuse the issue and early invoices and household accounts juggle with such words as ambry, aumbry, aumbrie, cupboard, book-presse, and press. The French dressoir, denoting a closed cupboard on a stand, gives us the dresser which developed from Jacobean origins in Britain.

The word aumbry was most frequently used for a type of wardrobe before Tudor times. It has several compartments with hinged doors and was used in churches as a safe. In a bewildering variety of spellings, a nunnery at Boston in Lincolnshire recorded in a 1534 inventory 'a playne arombry' with 'two lockes' for altar utensils, which a Durham monastery had 'almeryes of fine wenscote (boarding) being varnished and finely painted and guilted finely over with little images, very seemly and beautiful to behold, for the Reliques belonging to Saint Cuthbert to lye in'. Such pieces continued to be used in churches for books, vestments and relics until the Reformation, after which they gained a wider domestic use.

The Renaissance - England - Part 7

The 'turned' chair was the third type which made enormous strides in design during the century and became the basic form of seating in Elizabethan England. It was constructed of separate pieces, socketed together and the turning was of the knobbed or ringed variety. Its construction had become more open and the seat was usually of ample dimensions to take the voluminous clothing of the time.
Frequently it had a raked back for comfort and embodied four plain, stout stretchers. These were now about two inches above the floor, earlier stretchers having been at floor level. Originally designed as a foot rest and a protection from the cold of stone floors whose only covering would have been rushes, stretchers were gradually raised as carpets became more prevalent.

By the 17th century the function of stretchers as foot rests had disappeared completely and they remained as essential units of construction and vehicles for decoration. The discerning collector knows that the faker, using reproduction furniture techniques, can never successfully reproduce the scuffed, worn look of early oak stretchers, caused by the feet of generations; stools and chairs, benches and forms sold as examples of 15th and 16th century oak handmade furniture are immediately suspect if the stretchers present a telltale unused appearance.

A common feature of chairs was their display of two turned legs at the front and plain ones at the back. There are records of many with triangular seats, a style which continued into the 17th century, and often sloping arms swept down from the top corners of the back. All chairs had loose cushions; upholstered chairs began to appear late in Elizabeth's reign, although strictly this was a development of the 17th century. A contemporary observer wrote in 1597 that 'the fashion of cushioned chairs is taken up in every merchants house'. Large cushions, satin embroidered and edged with gold or silver lace, were used extensively for window seats in Elizabethan mansions.

Clues to everyday life in Elizabethan times have come down to us through invoices, household books and, frequently, from contemporary diarists. A prolific writer was William Harrison, topographer, chronologist, parson and scholar (1534 - 1593), who, in The Description of England, had ranged over a wide variety of topics. On the subject of domestic life-styles in the steadily prospering upper and middle class society of England he is at his most enlightening - he wrote:

The furniture of our houses also exceedeth and is grown in manner even to passing delicacy: and herein i do not speak of the nobility and gentry only, but likewise of the lowest sort in most places of our south country that have anything at all to take to. Certes in noblemen's houses it is not rare to see abundance of arras, rich hangings of tapestry, silver vessel and so much other plate as many furnish sundry cupboards to the sum oftentimes of a thousand or two thousand pounds at the least, whereby the value of this and and the rest of their stuff doth grow to be almost inestimable. Likewise in the houses of knights, gentlemen, merchantment and some other wealthy citizens it is not geson (rare) to behold generally their great provision of tapestry, Turkey work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and thereto costly cupboards of plate.

Harrison is using the term 'cupboard' - literally cup board - in its widest sense to denote any wooden structure with open display spaces on which to place plate and other utensils. In many Elizabethan inventories to words cupboard, aumbry and press seem to have been interchangeable.
Harrison provides interesting background information about developments in household fashions - many of which affected the progress of fitted and non fitted furniture design - when he touches on the question of glassware. Amid the increasing affluence of the more fortunate classes, glassware was apparently very fashionable, infinitely more fashionable than everyday gold and silver.

tomorrow, to be continued with 'tables'................

The Renaissance - England - Part 6

The settle type of chair has met with mixed fortunes in modern markets. Understandably, anything from the 16th century, which is frequently termed for convenience 'Elizabethan', and pieces from a similarly wide-embracing 'Jacobean' period command a high price. But settles, like some of the chests described in earlier articles, continued to be made throughout successive centuries. They epitomize country handmade furniture and their simple, joined construction offers no great challenge to the unsophisticated carpenter. They belong to the farmhouse kitchen but are equally at home in the country pub.

In a more exalted form, the 'joyned chair' has existed in the 15th century as a canopied piece of great height which stood on a small raised platform in the hall and from which the master could survey his household ranged on benches below. Sometimes they were made to be dismantled and were provided with leather packing cases into which the chair could be placed when the owner travelled from house to house. By the time of the Tudors, this travelling function had necessitated the emergence of a second type of chair, the X-frame, similar in construction to the modern camp stool and of a convenient form which lent itself to campaign and travelling non fitted furniture of wood and metal through several centuries up to the present. Originally of simple construction, with loose cushions provided for comfort, the X-frame was given a new lease of popularity in the mid 16th century, by which time it had developed into a luxurious piece in keeping with the mood of the time.

The woodwork was completely clothed in velvet, damask or silk and the loose cushions rested on a webbing support attached at each side to the rails of the frame. There is evidence of such chairs being provided in numbers for Henry VIII, wide, substantial examples ideally suited to the king's ample girth and weight, and richly fringed with gold silk. In the early years of Elizabeth's reign the court coterie vied with each other by ordering immensely costly examples in emulation of the queen's taste for X-frame chairs. They had frames which were gilded, painted and carved and often revealed the influence of the Italian style.

Winchester cathedral possesses an oak X-frame chair, somewhat bare in its unrestored state, but which once was covered in blue velvet secured with gilt headed nails and capped with metal finials, techniques and parts often used today with reproduction furniture. It dates from around 1550, the decade in which Elizabeth came to the throne. In this traditional form, the X shape is viewable from the front and rear. An oak armchair in the Victoria and Albert Museum, on the other hand, has X-shaped legs at the sides and the whole is meant to fold somewhat like a modern garden chair. It is a very early example of travelling convenience, dating from the turn of the 16th century.

to be continued......

The Renaissance - England - Part 5

When Margaret, daughter of Henry VII, travelled to Scotland to marry James IV in 1503 she attended a prenuptial supper in the course of which she complained that the stool given to her was 'not for her ease', whereupon the king offered her his 'Chayre', clearly the only one in the great hall of the castle.
The anecdote, recorded by the herald who accompanied Margaret, is more than just a tale of royal gallantry. It tells us much about the furnishing styles of the day. While the head of the house sat in the chair (probably the only one), benches, forms and simple joined stools sufficed for the less exalted. However, during the reign of the Tudors, seat furniture, handmade furniture, was to undergo a revolution. Indeed, it was already well under way in England at the time the Scottish James was attempting to show his bride that he could keep her in the manner to which she was accustomed.

In the early years of the 16th century three types of chair were in existence. The first was a simple development of the lidded chest, which was given panelled sides and back to form seating of the settle type but which still retained its box-seat compartment for the storage of linen. A similar natural progression had been witnessed in Italy, home of the Renaissance and many fitted and non fitted furniture innovations, where the massive, elaborately carved chest known as a cassone had been given low arms and a back to become a cassapanca. It was a piece that could seat several persons and though still retaining its chest, the cassapanca now fulfilled the principal function of the settle. It is interesting to note that while sunny Italy opted for low back and arms, the English settle developed a distinctive tall style which offered more comfort and protection in the draughty halls and chambers of northern climes.

The English settle was not, of course, a child of Tudor times. Its origins dated back some two centuries or more. Indeed, the styles of this particular type of seating in the 16th century deviated from the established Gothic only in details of ornamentation. It was translated into a 16th century product through the carver's vocabulary; Tudor roses, scrolls and dolphins, zigzags and interlaced strapwork, as well as linenfold. It was a happy repository for this last style of carving, which was ideally suited to rectilinear forms of Elizabethan examples of such chairs are among the aristocrats of early oak, commanding astronomic prices when (rarely) they appear on the market today.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has an example of a type known as a 'joyned chair', high backed, but with sides at arm level. Italianate Renaissance carving decorates a head panel, but the remainder  of the chair back and the front of the seat are carved in linenfold, the two styles harmonizing perfectly.

to be continued........

The Renaissance - England - Part 4

The panelling of the great halls of the early Tudor period displays these formal linenfold patterns and much of it bears evidence of the influence of a new breed of craftsmen who were being imported from the Continent to teach their English brothers. Peaceful times in England and the growth of domestic refinement required more comfortable surroundings. Royalty had its sumptuous palaces at Windsor and Richmond while elsewhere, feudal castles had given way to mansions which found ready employment for foreign craftsmen, artists and woodcarvers.

In Henry VIII's reign a traditional carving style which was a mixture of both Gothic and classical Renaissance was employed. A notable example of this transitional movement can be seen in the woodwork of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. Superb examples of the newly invigorated woodcarvers' skills can also be seen in the Great Hall at Hampton Court. The roof and choir stools of Henry VII's chapel at Westminster Abbey are rich in the new art. Later the Elizabethan carvers took the ribbon decoration of the French and the intricately laced strapwork of the Flemish, and combined them with grotesque figurework - creatures that were half human, half monster - in a distinctive style adapted from foreign ideas.

Italian influence was strong, both directly and indirectly (through movements from the Low Countries, where Italian Renaissance seeds had been quick to flower). In mid-Elizabethen times the country benefited from the flight of Antwerp merchants and their attendant craftsmen who were suffering at the hands of the Duke of Parma.
In Southwark Cathedral, London, there stands a magnificent treasure which owes its existence to the European influx into England during the 16th century. Not only is it yet another example of the church's part in handmade furniture development, but if offers a rare opportunity to examine a piece which represents an important landmark in case furniture design; the transition from the lidded box to the chest of drawers as a storage unit.

What had begun as the Church of St Mary Overie in 1106, probably on the site of an earlier religious establishment, became in 1540 the parish church of St Saviour, and in 1905 the Cathedral of Southwark. In 1588 the church received from Hugh Offley, Lord Mayor of London, and his father-in-law, Richard Harding, a piece of non fitted furniture, an oak chest which stands 99cm high and 198cm wide. The architecturally representative decoration in coloured wood on the front gives the chest its name - Nonsuch.
Nonsuch chests, many of which were made in southern England in the mid to late 16th century, are so named from a corruption of Toto del Nunziata, an Italian artist who was responsible for designs from which Henry VIII had a palace built at Cheam in Surrey. Late 16th century Nonsuch chests usually bore a resemblance in their decoration to the palace's appearance as depicted in contemporary illustrations. The Southwark piece is so decorated and it is believed to have been the work of German immigrant craftsmen, to whom similar chests have also been attributed.

The Southwark chest is on an arcaded stand of probably later date and sports characteristic subsidiary decoration of floral arabesques. But what sets it apart as the harbinger of a new and exciting development in case furniture is the existence of three small drawers in its lower portion. It is without doubt an extremely early example of a chest with drawers, although it is not claimed to be the first or even among the first such examples. Nevertheless chests with drawers did not become common in England for a decade or two after Offley and Harding made their presentation to the church.