This was more often the case in the furniture and other art in Germany, where the Renaissance was tardily welcomed.
Styles of design in furniture overlap each other so much, especially in the Renaissance period, that it becomes very difficult to assign a correct date to many pieces of important work. Gothic designs continued to be used during the sixteenth century, although the Renaissance had been developing for a hundred years earlier. The most authentic means of fixing the date is when certain work can be proved to have come from the hand of a particular artist, or when there is a record of its having been made for a king or some great person, for the style is not always a sure proof of the correct date.
In the “Quattrocento” period (1400-1500), or fifteenth century, Italian furniture made for churches, palaces, or private houses, was usually decorated with paintings, sometimes on a gilt ground, which was prepared in a gesso material before the gold was applied, some parts of which had relief ornamentation.
Reliquaries, altar-fronts, panels of cabinets, chests, and marriage coffers were decorated in this way.
Fig. 233.—Marriage Coffer of Carved Wood; Italian; Sixteenth Century. (J.)
The work known as “tarsia,” or certosina work, was made in great perfection about this time in Italy. It is inlaid work of a geometric character in design, or is composed of floral ornament, and sometimes consists of representations of landscapes and buildings. This kind of inlay was derived from Persian sources, was developed chiefly by the Venetians, and was used mostly by them in the decoration of choir stalls, tables, chairs, cabinets, &c. Ebony, ivory, and metals were also employed in the Italian inlays of this period.
The Italian Cassoni, or marriage-coffers, were the most ornate and most imposing articles of furniture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were placed in the long halls and corridors of the palaces and great houses, and were usually given as presents to newly married couples. They were generally used as the receptacle for the bride’s trousseau and other treasures. In the latter century they were carved in walnut with sculptural mythological subjects, and had endings or corners of half-figures and half-foliage, as caryatids, with feet designed from the claws of animals to raise them from the ground (Fig. 233). The carving was relieved by gilding in parts, and sometimes the whole of it was gilt.
Other examples of an earlier date were covered with a finely modelled decoration of gesso work, and gilded, and in other cases the large panels in the front were painted with figure subjects in brilliant colours and heightened with gold.
A less costly kind of marriage coffer was made in cypress-wood, and fitted up in the inside with drawers, having the decoration on the surface engraved or etched in brown lines, with the ground slightly recessed and punched or stamped with a fine ornamentation.