Ancient and Modern Furniture and Woodwork

by John Hungerford Pollen

The beds, as represented in manuscript illuminations, belong chiefly to religious compositions such as the Nativity, or visions appearing to saints in their sleep. They are couches in the old Roman form, or are supported on turned legs, from the frames of which valances hang down to the ground. Sometimes a curtain acts as a screen at the head or on one side, but testers are wanting.

Chariots and carriages of all sorts remained more or less Roman in type. There were a greater number of waggons or carriages for the conveyance of women and families than had been in use in ancient times. Christianity had materially altered the social position of women, and they appeared in public or moved about with their families without the restraints which in the old Roman society forbad their appearance in chariots and open carriages, and made the covered couch or closed litter the usual conveyance for ladies of rank in Rome. Several forms of chariots or carriages of this larger kind can be seen in the sculptures of the column of Theodosius in Constantinople.

The art and the domestic manners and customs that had been in fashion in Rome maintained themselves with some modifications in Constantinople. The life there was more showy and pompous, but it was free from the cruelties and the corruption of the elder society. It was founded on the profession of Christianity, and the numbers and magnificence of the religious hierarchy formed an important feature in the splendid social aspect of the Greek capital. The games of the circus, without the cruelties of gladiatorial combats, were maintained. Chariots were in constant use, much wealth was spent on their construction, and chariot races were kept up. Furniture, such as chairs, couches, chests, caskets, mirrors and articles of the toilet, was exceedingly rich. Gold and silver were probably more abundant in the great houses of Constantinople than they had been in Rome. As the barbarous races of the east and north encroached on the flourishing provinces of the Roman empire, constant immigration took place to Constantinople and the provinces still under its sway. Families brought with them such property as could be easily moved, gold of course and jewels; and, naturally, these precious materials were afterwards used for the decoration of their furniture and dress.

The ancient custom of reclining at meals had ceased. The guests sat on benches or chairs. At the same time the "triclinia aurea," or golden dining room, was still the title of the great hall of audience in the palace at Constantinople. The term only served to illustrate the jealous retention of the old forms and names by the emperors and patricians. The last branch of the ancient empire did little for the arts of painting and sculpture, though it long preserved the old traditions of art, gradually becoming more and more debased with every succeeding generation, whilst outward splendour was increased because of the greater quantity of the precious metals that had accumulated or been inherited during so many centuries.

The decay of art and skill in the old world was, however, counterbalanced by the rise of new societies, which were gradually being formed in various parts of the empire. These consisted partly of the races of Huns, Goths, Saxons, and others, who had invaded Italy and settled themselves in it, partly of the old municipal corporations, who defended their property and maintained their privileges in the great walled towns of Italy. The cities profited to a great extent by this infusion of new blood; and became the parents of the future provinces of Italy, so rich in genius and industry, so wealthy and powerful in peace and war. The most important of them was Venice, and it is in Venice that, in the later middle ages, we find the birthplace of most of the art with which the furniture and utensils of home and warlike use were so profusely decorated.

We point to Constantinople as the last stronghold of the old arts of the Roman period, but it is because it was from the Greeks that the new states borrowed their first notions of art. Nearly all the early art we meet with throughout the west in manuscripts and ivories bears a Byzantine character.

A remarkable piece of monumental furniture has survived from these early centuries of the Christian era, half Byzantine and half western in character, the chair of St. Maximian of Ravenna, preserved in the treasury at Ravenna, and engraved and described in the "Arts Somptuaires" of M. Du Sommerard. Ravenna was the portion of the empire that most intimately connected the east with the west. The domed churches of San Vitale, San Giovanni in Fonte, the tomb of Galla Placidia, the round church of Santa Maria, built by Theodoric, together with the great basilica of Saint Apollinare in Chiasse, and others of the Latin form, unite the characteristics of the eastern and western architecture. What is true of architecture can also be pronounced as to painting, sculpture, textile fabrics, and all decoration applied to objects, sacred or domestic, that were in daily use.

But events occurred in the declining state of the empire that went far to transfer what remained of art to northern Europe. The sect of the iconoclasts, or image-breakers, rose into power and authority under the emperor Leo the Isaurian, who published an edict in 726 condemnatory of the veneration and use of religious images and paintings. During a century this principle was at work, and it caused the destruction not only of innumerable antique statues, such as those defaced in the Parthenon of Athens, but the loss of vast quantities of ivory and wood sculpture and precious objects of all kinds. Many artists took refuge in western Europe, and were welcomed in the Rhenish provinces of the empire by Charlemagne.

How much ancient and domestic art in the form of bronze or other metal furniture, such as chairs, thrones, tripods, &c., whole or in fragments, survived the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II. we cannot conjecture. Perhaps the royal palaces, or still more possibly the mosques which have been the banks and depositories of family treasures under Mahometan rule, may contain valuable bronzes, ivories, and carved wood, relics of the luxurious life of the latter days of the Greek empire, and such evidences may some day come to light. No doubt, however, much antique art and much that belonged to the first eight centuries of our era survived the ordinary shocks of time and war, only to be destroyed by the quiet semi-judicial action of a furious sect protected by imperial decrees, after the manner in which mediæval art suffered under the searching powers of fanatical government commissioners in our own country, in the sixteenth century.

It is to the impulse which the Lombard and Frankish monarchs gave to art in western and northern Europe by the protection of Greek refugee sculptors and artists that we should trace the beginnings of the northern school called Rhenish-Byzantine.