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    Furniture of the Renaissance to the Baroque - A Treatise on the Furniture from Around Europe in this Period
    Furniture of the Renaissance to the Baroque - A Treatise on the Furniture from Around Europe in this Period
    Furniture of the Renaissance to the Baroque - A Treatise on the Furniture from Around Europe in this Period
    Ebook83 pages50 minutes

    Furniture of the Renaissance to the Baroque - A Treatise on the Furniture from Around Europe in this Period

    By Peter Philp

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    About this ebook

    This fascinating little book contains a treatise on furniture from around the world, all produced in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Complete with detailed illustrations and comprehensive information on aspects such as history, manufacturing, and popularity, this book constitutes a veritable must-read for anyone with an interest in the history of furniture and makes for a great addition to collections of such literature. This text has been chosen for modern republication due to its timeless educational value, and we are proud to republish it now complete with a new introduction on the history of furniture.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9781473357624
    Furniture of the Renaissance to the Baroque - A Treatise on the Furniture from Around Europe in this Period

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      Book preview

      Furniture of the Renaissance to the Baroque - A Treatise on the Furniture from Around Europe in this Period - Peter Philp

      Renaissance to Baroque

      I HOPE these chapter headings aren’t too off-putting for those to whom terms like ‘Gothic’, ‘Renaissance’, ‘Baroque’ and so on are vague descriptions they have heard applied to draughty buildings by boring guides. The advantage of borrowing these words from architecture is that, when applied to furniture, they really are a little vague, in a way that gives the boring guide—in this case, myself—a chance to be discursive.

      Although, as I have said in the Introduction, I do not much favour furnishing-schemes which try to be too faithful to a period, in writing a book of this kind it is simpler for everyone if some kind of chronological sequence is followed. If it is being written entirely from a national viewpoint, concerning itself only with the furniture of one country, to be read only by the people who live in it, then the author can chop up his text into convenient chunks with familiar names and dates. If it is written in English, for English and American readers and is devoted to English furniture, then phrases like ‘The Early Stuart Period’ or simply ‘1600-1650’ make adequate sub-titles.

      The difficulty is that books about antiques are read by a cosmopolitan public—or the author fondly hopes they will be—and this one attempts, however superficially, to take account of the furniture of other countries besides Great Britain, partly because it is impossible to understand English furniture without some reference to foreign influences, and partly because there will surely be some readers, even among the English themselves, who want to take an interest in the work of other nations besides their own.

      To divide the story of furniture up, and label the divisions according to the course of English history, thus becomes too confusing a business altogether, if only for the reason that certain dominating influences were operating much earlier in some countries than in others.

      That which we call the Renaissance began in Italy in the fifteenth century and only affected Britain, directly and indirectly, about a hundred years later. In the main, the influence was transmitted indirectly via the Low Countries, but there was perhaps rather more direct influence than is popularly supposed. For example, Henry VIII brought Italian craftsmen to work at Hampton Court on rooms intended for Anne Boleyn’s use. The fact that she had been beheaded before the work was completed was her sad misfortune. Certainly, in the literary sphere, there was a lively interest in Italian writing. Shakespeare is known to have pinched more than one of his plots from Italian sources, and during the reign of Elizabeth I, some seven hundred Italian manuscripts were translated into English.

      During the hundred years that elapsed between 1450 and 1550, the course of world history was radically changed by widely differing causes. To attempt to enumerate them and explain them is beyond the scope of this book, not to mention the ability of its author. They included events as seemingly disparate as the fall of the Eastern Empire, the invention of the printing press, the discovery of America, and the Sack of Rome. They led to powerful movements such as the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. They saw the re-birth of learning in general, a re-awakening of interest in the arts, and especially the artistic values of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. All this, or rather the net result of this, was the flowering of thought and skill which we call the Renaissance.

      Part of the impetus undoubtedly came as the consequence of a disaster to Christendom: the seizing of Byzantium (Constantinople) by the Turks in 1453. This meant that Rome was now the centre of the Christian faith, and into Rome there flocked many refugees from the capital of the Eastern Empire, bringing with them not only many treasures from Byzantium, but also the skills that had gone into their making. The Roman Church was itself weak to the point of near collapse, and Italy was divided into quarrelling states, all of them the potential prey of watchful Europe. Yet out of this confused picture there emerged a splendid upsurge of creative talent that manifested itself in painting such as the Western world had never seen, architecture that set out to rival and even surpass the achievements of the ancients, and magnificent examples of craftsmanship in gold, silver, pottery, and woodwork.

      Two main influences are apparent in furniture of the Italian Renaissance, and to some extent they were contradictory and difficult to reconcile. The first was the discipline of classical architecture, which began to be studied seriously shortly after 1400. It led to a pedantic insistence on very correct proportions, and the construction of many pieces of furniture as though they were miniature buildings in stone rather than wood. Indeed, various stones, especially coloured marbles, were regularly employed, not only for practical purposes as tops for tables, but also for decorative mosaic work. The wood itself was frequently painted or gilded so that its grain—its ‘woodiness’—was concealed—but this had also been true, of course, of much Gothic furniture. And just as the Gothic style had employed such architectural motifs as the pointed arch in the construction and decoration of furniture, so the Renaissance used classical columns and entablatures. There is no reason why architecture should not exert this kind of influence on furniture at any given time, provided the designer keeps in mind that it is a piece of furniture he is designing, and not a

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