In adopting the Renaissance style as a motive in interior decoration, England lagged behind the Continental nations. Such English mansions and furniture as remained after the Wars of the Roses were all of the Gothic type; and with no other models available, it was but natural that the first efforts of English workmen, after art began to revive, should be Gothic in feeling. Moreover, for a long time most of the carved wood-work and furniture in the new style with which England was supplied, was imported from Holland, and it is in some measure to Dutch example that the heavy character of the Elizabethan style in furniture and carving must be attributed.
The style was, therefore, neither Classic nor Gothic, but a mixture of the two, tinged with Dutch and Flemish influence; and yet, mongrel as it was, it had an individuality of its own—a certain, royal, dignified and stately charm.
The first distinguishing feature of Elizabethan ornamental carving is "strap-work," a term which exactly describes this elaborate tracery,—an imitation of straps and buckles, varied sufficiently to atone for the meagreness of the type, and relying for its decorative value upon its repetition and symmetry. There are many rooms in old English houses where this strap-decoration is carried out with so delicate and fanciful a use of the interlacing line as to be nearly as satisfying as the Saracenic work of the same type; but it is, after all, nothing but a play of line, and, while allowing the greatest scope to the individuality of the artist, requires genius to properly develop it. Too frequently it is but the merest medley of uninteresting sequences; and when the shield-work (and pierced shield-work at that) was superadded, it sometimes became mere confusion.
| MANTELPIECE | STOKESAY CASTLE |
Another distinguishing motive of shield-work,—the cartouch—is simply what its name implies, the representation of the armorial shield with its supports. The supports were pierced in every conceivable manner with circles, lozenges, crescents and all sorts of openings.
"The Elizabethan, pure and simple," writes Mrs. Spofford, "has this strap-work sometimes finished off with slight scrolls—'foliages,' the Italians called them—and associated with some classical ideas not yet very exclusively or carefully managed; straps appearing well riveted to the middle of classic ornaments, and antique shapes rising, from the curious Renaissance pilaster, which was neither a vase nor a pilaster, in truth, broken as it is half way by the rising shape, like those of the Termae, with which the ancients made their boundaries sacred, smaller at the base than anywhere else, and bearing straps, arabesques and rosettes on its face."
You will sometimes find an Elizabethan chimney-piece, the fluted and channelled columns, and the entablature of which are almost quite pure in style, and yet, almost invariably, somewhere about their length strap-ornament is sure to be introduced.