Middle Ages Furniture
THE MIDDLE AGES
For centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD there is no clear picture of the development of individual domestic furniture styles in Western Europe. Byzantium was now the capital of the Eastern Empire and of the Christian Church, and such pieces as can be dated and attributed to Western Europe were influenced by Byzantine furniture styles. In many cases they may have been made by Byzantine craftsmen. Among these are a sixth-century bishop’s throne of ivory at Ravenna in Italy and a bronze throne supposedly made in about 600 AD and used by the Frankish king Dagobert 1 (628-639). The latter is based on the folding stool principle of construction.
In the Eastern Roman Empire, meanwhile, the craft of furniture-making continued unabated, although its styles became more and more ecclesiastical. At the same time these styles also reflected the older traditions of the Near East. The graceful and relaxed contours of classical Greece and Rome gave way to upright, rigid and uncomfortable lines like the Ravenna ivory throne, which itself was closer to ancient Persian thrones. But if the gracefulness diminished, the carving and the embellishment retained their high quality, in some cases bearing comparison with the best Roman work. And when the secret of silk manufacture, for centuries the monopoly of China, was revealed in the middle of the sixth century by two Byzantine monks who had smuggled some silk-worm eggs back to Greece from the East, silk-weaving leapt into importance as an industry, not least for the drapery and upholstery of furniture.
When furniture-making as a skill reappears in Western Europe the earliest pieces of any merit are ecclesiastical, and for the most part they are fixed items, such as stalls, prayer benches, etc., in early churches. Gradually, more attention was paid to movable articles like stools and chests. Folding stools were as popular as they had been in earlier days, and now they took two distinct forms: one for ecclesiastical use and the other for regal or military use. It was the chest, however, that appears to have received the greatest attention.
When a feudal system of land ownership began to evolve in Western Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries, landlords began to accumulate domestic possessions, such as clothing, jewellery and household utensils. The nature of their way of life ? they had to travel incessantly about their often extensive territories involved continual cartage of their belongings. Not only did seats and beds have to be. easily dismantled and then reassembled, but a variety of smaller pieces of equipment also had to be transported because they were in constant use. For this, the wooden chest became indispensable.
For centuries, then, an enormous variety of sizes and shapes of chest was produced in nearly every country in Western Europe, for both secular and ecclesiastical use. Many of them were embellished with fine carving. Some were bound with decorative ironwork strips, and even the earliest ones had iron locks or clasps. Tops were flat or gabled; if flat they would be used as seats when they were not being transported, and eventually they were made to stand on legs which were extensions of the vertical end members.
Not long after the Norman invasions of Italy and England in the eleventh century the first cupboards since Roman times appear in Europe. They are crudely constructed, in some cases so much so that they are painted with portraits or figures in vivid colours to hide the indifferent workmanship at the joints.
The same crude and uneven quality pervades surviving chairs, benches and couches from these centuries, and the best craftsmanship is confined to woodwork in ecclesiastical buildings, such as the great cathedrals and abbeys which were springing up from Wales to Austria and from Scotland to Spain in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The fifteenth century marked the introduction of new styles of furniture-making in Europe. Loosely described by later generations as Gothic, like the architecture of the same name, they embodied decorative motifs such as tracery, finials, pointed arches and foliage. The quality of construction also improved. Chests, for example, ceased to be just assemblages of thick planks, with here and there exuberant but not very delicate carving. They began to be made of wood in a proper framework, with rails, thin panelling and architectural ornament. They also assumed proper proportions.
The changes were first seen in Flanders where some of the towns had become extremely prosperous by virtue of the cloth trade or through shipping. One new piece of furniture which appeared was the dressoir, a tall structure consisting of a chest with doors, supported by a stand on a plinth, a natural development from the chest. The gap between the chest part and the plinth could be used for displaying exceptional items of metalware or pottery. The chest part was more or less at eye level, and therefore suitable for storage of cups, small ewers, etc.
Chests were also developed into settles with backs and sides. The area beneath the main box part began to be utilized for drawers. A whole new vista of ornamentation opened, in which asymmetry was a distinguishing feature. This is clear from the carving on the front of the chest from France illustrated here. One popular type of wood ornament was linenfold, and some of the best examples of this type of carving came from England. Much of the tracery was of ecclesiastical origin, imitating as it did the beautiful creative work in stone and wood from the cathedrals and abbeys, and this is easy to Austrian folding stool of the 1 3th century, possibly from the time of the Hapsburgs. This stool has ducks’ head ends for the feet, like the ancient Egyptian stool illustrated on page 6 understand in an age when religion played a dominant part in all men’s lives.
The principal feature, however, of this Gothic period of furniture was the appearance, for the first time, of furniture fashions. Different regions of Western Europe enjoyed individual vogues of design and manufacture. In fifteenth-century France, for example, the ornamentation on wood concentrated on foliage and animal designs and it was generally very elaborate. This was made easier by the increasing use of walnut, a wood that is softer than the oak which continued to predominate in England and Germany.
When the influence of the Italian Renaissance first made itself felt in Western Europe it began by superficial decorative impositions on basic Gothic styles. But the acceptance of the new philosophical ideas of the Renaissance among thinking people led to Renaissance furniture styles superseding altogether the Gothic-ecclesiastical style. Resistance to this change lasted longest in England.
A good example of a Gothic style dressoir, from France in the 15th century. There is a small drawer under the cupboard doors in the top part
(left) Detail of Perpendicular tracery from a similar chest
(below) Late 1 5th-century Gothic chest from France, with Perpendicular tracery and asymmetrical foliage
(right) Ivory throne for a bishop, made at Ravenna in the 6th century AD. Its shape and carving are strongly Byzantine
(far right) Italian chest of the 8th century, displaying clearly the influence of Byzantium. The metal band is small for the size of chest and may not be original
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