Produced by Chris Curnow, Lesley Halamek and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM ART HANDBOOKS. EDITED BY WILLIAM MASKELL. No. 3.--FURNITURE ANCIENT AND MODERN. _These Handbooks are reprints of the dissertations prefixed to the large catalogues of the chief divisions of works of art in the Museum at South Kensington; arranged and so far abridged as to bring each into a portable shape. The Lords of the Committee of Council on Education having determined on the publication of them, the editor trusts that they will meet the purpose intended; namely, to be useful, not alone for the collections at South Kensington but for other collections, by enabling the public at a trifling cost to understand something of the history and character of the subjects treated of._ _The authorities referred to in each book are given in the large catalogues; where will also be found detailed descriptions of the very numerous examples in the South Kensington Museum._ W. M. _August, 1875._ ANCIENT AND MODERN FURNITURE AND WOODWORK BY JOHN HUNGERFORD POLLEN WITH NUMEROUS WOODCUTS [Illustration] _Published for the Committee of Council on Education_ BY CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY LONDON. DALZIEL BROTHERS, PRINTERS, CAMDEN PRESS, N.W. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I Furniture Ancient and Modern 1 II Antique: Egypt, Nineveh and Greece 4 III The Romans 17 IV Byzantine Art 29 V The Middle Ages 41 VI The Fifteenth Century 59 VII The Renaissance in Italy 66 VIII Renaissance in England, Flanders, France, Germany, ans Spain 78 IX Tudor and Stuart Styles 85 X Furniture of the Eighteenth Century 103 XI Changes of Taste and Style 116 Appendix: Names of the Designers of Woodwork and Makers of Furniture 133 Index 140 LIST OF WOODCUTS. PAGE Egyptian chair 4 Assyrian chairs 7 Greek chair 10 Greek chairs 11 Greek couches 13 Greek mirror 14 Greek chariot 15 Pompeian interior 19 Roman tripod 22 Roman candelabra 23 Roman candelabra 24 Roman table 26 Roman couch 27 Roman ceremonial chair 28 Roman _sella_ 28 Roman kitchen utensils 30 St. Peter's chair 35 The chair of king Dagobert 43 Anglo-norman bedstead 46 The Coronation chair 49 Interior of English mediæval bedroom 51 Anglo-saxon dinner-table 52 Dinner-table of middle-class, fifteenth century 53 Table of fifteenth century 53 Travelling carriage of fifteenth century; "Tullia driving over the body of her father" 55 Oriental panels 57 A royal dinner-table of the fourteenth century 58 French panel; fifteenth century 60 Venetian cornice 68 Portion of carved Italian chest 69 Venetian chair 71 Italian bellows 72 Another example 73 Knife-case; 1564 76 Carved panels 80 French table; sixteenth century 81 French panel; 1577 82 English panel; about 1590 86 French cabinet; sixteenth century 88 Italian oak pedestal 90 Venetian mirror-frame 91 German arm-chair; seventeenth century 93 English bracket; about 1660 97 English doorway; about 1690 98 Venetian looking-glass 100 Holy-water stoup 101 English dinner-table; 1633 102 Italian distaff 106 Roman _triclinium_ 117 Bedstead; fifteenth century 118 The great bed of Ware 119 Bedstead at Hampton Court 120 Mediæval room 120 Cradle; fifteenth century 121 Folding chair; fifteenth century 122 Italian chair; sixteenth century 123 Antique Roman tables 125 Folding table; English, 1620(?) 126 Mediæval chest 127 Roman carriages 130 English carriage; fourteenth century 131 State carriages 132 FURNITURE, ANCIENT AND MODERN. CHAPTER I. The study of a collection of old furniture has an interest beyond the mere appreciation of the beauty it displays. The carving or the ornaments that decorate the various pieces and the skill and ingenuity with which they are put together are well worthy of our attention. A careful examination of them carries us back to the days in which they were made and to the taste and manners, the habits and the requirements, of bygone ages. The Kensington museum, for example, contains chests, caskets, cabinets, chairs, carriages, and utensils of all sorts and of various countries. Some of these have held the bridal dresses, fans, and trinkets of French and Italian beauties, whose sons and daughters for many generations have long gone to the dust; there are inlaid folding chairs used at the court of Guido Ubaldo, in the palace of Urbino, and of other Italian princes of the fifteenth century; buffets and sideboards that figured at mediæval feasts; boxes in which were kept the jesses and bells of hawks; love-tokens of many kinds, christening-spoons, draught and chess men, card boxes, belonging to the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; carriages of the London of Cromwell and Hogarth, and of the Dublin of Burke; panelling of the date of Raleigh; a complete room made for a lady of honour to Marie Antoinette. Besides these memorials of periods comparatively well known to us, we shall find reproductions of the furniture of ages the habits of which we know imperfectly, such as the chair of Dagobert, and various relics illustrating the old classic manners and civilisation, as they have come down to us from Roman and Greek artists, and brought to light by the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The field through which a collection of old furniture stretches is too wide to be filled with anything like completeness; but the South Kensington collection is already rich in some very rare examples, such as carved chests and cabinets, decorated with the most finished wood carving of Flanders, France, and Italy, as well as of our own country. As wood is the material of which furniture for domestic use has generally been made, there are, of course, limits to its endurance, and not much furniture is to be found anywhere older than the renaissance. Objects for domestic use, such as beds, chairs, chests, tables, &c., are rare, and have not often been collected together. The museum of the hôtel de Cluny, in Paris, is the best representative collection of woodwork anterior to the quattro or cinque cento period--_i.e._ the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. Some carved and gilt carriages belonging to the last century are also there; and a set of carriages, carved and gilt, made for state ceremonials, used during the latter part of the last century and down to the days of the empire of Napoleon III. are, or were till the war of 1870, kept at the Trianon at Versailles. Many cabinets and tables in Boule work, Vernis-Martin work, and in marquetry by Riesener, Gouthière, David, and others, in the possession of Sir Richard Wallace, were lately exhibited in the museum at Bethnal Green, and examples by the same artists from St. Cloud and Meudon are in the Louvre in Paris. A fine collection of carriages, belonging to the royal family of Portugal, is kept in Lisbon. These are decorated in the "Vernis-Martin" method. Several old royal state carriages, carved and gilt, the property of the emperor of Austria, are at Vienna. In order to take a general review of the kinds, forms, and changes of personal and secular woodwork and furniture, as manners and fashions have influenced the wants of different nations and times, it will be well to divide the subject in chronological order into antique; Egyptian, Ninevite, Greek, Roman:--modern; early and late mediæval:--renaissance; seventeenth and eighteenth century work: to be followed by an inquiry into the changes that some of the pieces of furniture in most frequent use have undergone. CHAPTER II. ANTIQUE: EGYPT, NINEVEH, AND GREECE. Considering the perishable nature of the material, we cannot expect to meet with many existing specimens of the woodwork or furniture of ancient Egypt. There are to be found, however, abundant illustrations of these objects in the paintings and sculptures of monuments. The most complete are on the walls of the tombs, where we see detailed pictures of domestic life, and the interiors of houses are shown, with entertainments of parties of ladies and gentlemen talking, listening to music, eating and drinking. The guests are seated on chairs of wood, framed up with sloping backs, of which specimens are in the British museum; others are on stools or chairs of greater splendour, stuffed and covered on the seat and back with costly textiles, having the wooden framework carved and gilt, generally in the form of the fore and hind legs of tigers, panthers, and other animals of the chace, sometimes supported, as in the accompanying woodcut, on figures representing captives. [Illustration] The British museum contains six Egyptian chairs. One of these is made of ebony, turned in the lathe and inlaid with collars and dies of ivory. It is low, the legs joined by light rails of cane, the back straight, with two cross-bars and light rails between. The seat is slightly hollowed, and is of plaited cane as in modern chairs. Another is square, also with straight back, but with pieces of wood sloped into the seat to make it comfortable for a sitter. Small workmen's stools of blocks of wood hollowed out and with three or four legs fastened into them may also be referred to, and a table on four legs tied by four bars near the lower ends. The Egyptians used couches straight, like ottomans; with head boards curving over as in our modern sofas, sometimes with the head and tail of an animal carved on the ends, and the legs and feet carved to correspond. These were stuffed and covered with rich material. The Egyptians did not recline at meals. Their double seats, [Greek: diphroi], or bisellia, were such as were used by the Greeks and Romans. They had shelves and recesses, chests and coffers, made of pine or cedar wood, and of a material still used in Egypt, the _cafass_--palm sticks formed into planks by thin pegs or rods of harder wood passing through a series of these sticks laid together. "Of their bedroom furniture," says Sir Gardner Wilkinson, "we know but little." They used (he tells us) their day couches probably, or lay on mats, and on low wooden pallets made of palm sticks. These last had curved blocks, which served for a pillow, forming a hollow to receive the head. Examples in alabaster and wood are in the Louvre and in the British museum. Their materials for dress were of the most delicate and costly description. The robes of the ladies were often transparent, and the gold and silver tissues, muslins, and gossamer fabrics made in India and Asia were probably also used in Egypt. All these, as well as their jewels and valuables, imply corresponding chests and smaller coffers. Small toilet boxes elegantly carved into the form or with representations of leaves and animals, are preserved in the Louvre and in the British museum and other collections. They were generally of sycamore wood, sometimes of tamarisk or sont (acacia), and occasionally the more costly ivory or inlaid work was substituted for wood. Larger boxes may also be seen in the Louvre, some large enough to contain dresses. They are square, with flat, curved, or gable tops, painted on the surface, and generally lifted from the ground by four short legs or prolongations of the rails that form the framework. These boxes are dovetailed, and secured by glue and nails. Their chariots and the harness of their horses were rich in proportion, the former painted, inlaid with ivory and gold, or with surface gilding, containing cases for their bows and arms, and made of wood filled in with the lightest materials, perhaps canvas stiffened with preparations of lac in the Japanese manner, and put together with a skill that made the carriage-makers of Egypt famous in their day. It will be sufficient to add that the great Jewish kings had their chariots supplied from Egypt. Solomon paid about £75 of our money for a chariot, and of these he kept (for war purposes alone) a force of fourteen hundred, with forty thousand horses. Mummy cases of cedar, a material readily procured and valued for its preservative qualities, are to be seen in many collections, and examples can be examined in the British museum. They are richly decorated with hieroglyphic paintings executed in tempera, and varnished with gum mastic. The furniture of Nineveh is not so elaborately or completely represented as that of Egypt, where the preservation of sculpture and painting was helped out by a climate of extraordinary dryness. But the discoveries of Mr. Layard have thrown on the details of Ninevite domestic life light enough to give us the means of forming a judgment on their furniture. "Ornaments," says Mr. Layard, "in the form of the heads of animals, chiefly the lion, bull, and ram, were very generally introduced, even in parts of the chariot, the harness of the horses, and domestic furniture." In this respect the Assyrians resembled the Egyptians. "Their tables, thrones, and couches were made both of metal and wood, and probably inlaid with ivory. We learn from Herodotus that those in the temple of Belus in Babylon were of solid gold." [Illustration] [Illustration] According to Mr. Layard, the chair represented in the earliest monuments is without a back, and the legs tastefully carved. This form occurs in the palace of Nimrúd, and is sculptured on one of the bas-reliefs now in the British museum. Often the legs ended in the feet of a lion or the hoofs of a bull, and were made of gold, silver, or bronze. "On the monuments of Khorsabad and by the rock tablets of Malthaiyah we find representations of chairs supported by animals and by human figures, sometimes prisoners, like the Caryatides of the Greeks. In this they resemble the arm-chairs of Egypt, but appear to have been more massive. This mode of ornamenting the throne of the king was adopted by the Persians, and is seen in the sculpture of Persepolis." The woodcut represents such a chair, from a bas-relief at Khorsabad. The lion head and lion foot were used by other oriental nations. The throne of king Solomon was supported by lions for arms, probably in the same position as the horses in the Khorsabad chair; and lions of gold or chryselephantine work stood six on each side on the six steps before the throne. The forms of furniture of a later date in the sculptures of Nineveh at Khorsabad are of an inferior style. "The chairs have generally more than one cross-bar, and are somewhat heavy and ill-proportioned, the feet resting upon large inverted cones, resembling pine-apples." All these seats, like the [Greek: diphroi] and _sellæ_ of important personages in Greece and Rome, were high enough to require a footstool. "On the earlier monuments of Assyria footstools are very beautifully carved or modelled. The feet were ornamented, like those of the chair, with the feet of lions or the hoofs of bulls." The tables seem in general to have been of similar form and decoration to the thrones or seats, the ends of the frame projecting and carved as in the woodcut above, only on a larger scale. The couches were of similar form, but made of gold and silver, stuffed and covered on the surface with the richest materials. The tables and the chairs were often made in the shape also found in Greece and Rome, with folding supports that open on a central rivet like our camp-stools, and like the curule chairs which were common not only in Rome but throughout Italy during the renaissance. A large piece of wood of pine or cedar is in the British museum. It is of a full red colour, the effect of time. Cedar was probably most in use; but both in Egypt and Nineveh, as also in Judæa under Solomon and his successors, woods were imported from Europe and India; ebony certainly, perhaps rosewood, teak, and Indian walnut. Ebony and ivory were continually used for inlaying furniture. Of their bedroom furniture we can say little, nor do we know of what kind were the cabinets or chests made to preserve their dresses and valuables. It is probable, however, that these were occasionally as rich and elaborate as any of their show or state furniture. Of Hebrew furniture we can give few details. It is probable that the Jews differed but little from the Assyrians in this respect. The throne of Solomon has been already noticed. In the story of Judith the canopy and curtains of the bed of Holofernes may have been taken by the chronicler from familiar examples at home, or may have been strictly drawn from traditional details. In the figurative language of the Canticles, the bed of Solomon is of cedar of Lebanon, the pillars of silver, the bottom of gold. Ordinary bedroom furniture is spoken of in the Chronicles, when the Shunamite woman, a person of great wealth, built for the prophet Elias "a little chamber on the wall, and set therein a bed, a table, a stool, and a candlestick." Ivory wardrobes are mentioned in the 45th psalm, but of what size or form we cannot determine. In the book of Esther allusions are made to Persian furniture decorations, white, green, and blue hangings fastened with fine linen to silver rings and pillars of marble. The beds were of gold and silver, &c. The bed of Og, king of Bashan, was nine cubits long by four, and was of iron: it was preserved as a trophy. As the chariots of Solomon were made in Egypt, and the artists employed on the Temple came from Tyre, it is not unreasonable to suppose that furniture was either made by foreign workmen, or that the Hebrews borrowed freely the forms and decorations of surrounding Asiatic nations. Though specially and purposely jealous of any innovation or interference with religious rites and observances, we have no cause to think that they objected to the use of furniture or utensils such as they found first during the long sojourn in Egypt, and afterwards in other countries. They are said in earlier times to have spoiled the Egyptians with reference to the ornaments and jewels carried away at the migration. We know that Moses was "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians;" and two particular artists, and two only, are named in the book of Exodus as qualified to execute the sacred vessels and utensils. Whatever their technical qualifications were, these had been acquired in Egypt. In any attempt to picture to ourselves the kind of furniture and objects of daily use apart from chariots, arms, &c., that surrounded the Greeks in early ages, it will be necessary to bear in mind the close connection which that people must have had with the Asiatic races, and the splendour and refinement that surrounded the wealthy civilisation of the oriental monarchies. They were so continually the allies or the rivals of the various states in Asia Minor, and pushed out into that fertile region so many vigorous colonies, that it cannot be doubted that the splendid stuffs, beds, couches, thrones, chariots, &c., used by Greeks on the Asiatic continent or in Europe, had much of eastern character in form and method of execution; perhaps, at first, in decoration also. This woodcut represents a chair of Assyrian character on a bas-relief from Xanthus, in the British museum. [Illustration] Much that is oriental figures in poetic accounts of the arms, furniture, and equipments of the Greek heroic ages. The chiefs take the field in chariots. These could have been used but in small numbers on ground so uneven as the rocky territories of the Morea. The beds described by Homer, the coverlids of dyed wool, tapestries, or carpets, and other instances of coloured and showy furniture, were genuine descriptions of objects known and seen, though not common. Generally the furniture of the heroic age was simple. Two beds of bronze of Tartessus, one Dorian and one Ionian, the smallest weighing fifty talents, of uncertain date, were kept in the treasury at Altis, and seen there by Pausanias towards the end of the second century. The chariots differed little except in the ornamental carving, modelling, or chasing, from those of Egypt. The oldest remaining models of Greek furniture to which we can point are the chairs in which the antique figures in the Syrian room at the British museum are seated. These are dated six, or nearly six, centuries before Christ. They represent chairs with backs, quite perpendicular in front and behind. The frame-pieces of the seats are morticed into the legs, and the mortices and tenons are accurately marked in the marble, the horizontal passing right through the upright bars. These early pieces of furniture were probably executed in wood, not metal, which was at first but rarely used. The woodcuts show the different forms taken from antique bas-reliefs. [Illustration] The chest or coffer in which Cypselus of Corinth had been concealed was seen by Pausanias in the temple of Olympia. It was made about the middle of the sixth century B.C. The chest was of cedar, carved and decorated with figures and bas-reliefs, some in ivory, some in gold or ivory partly gilt, which were inlaid on the four sides and on the top. The subjects of the sculpture were old Greek myths and local legends, and traditions connected with the country. This coffer is supposed to have been executed by Eumelos of Corinth. The great period of Greek art began in the fifth century B.C.; but those were not days favourable to the development of personal luxury among the citizens. An extreme simplicity in private manners balanced the continual publicity and political excitement of Greek life. The rich classes, moreover, had little inducement to make any display of their possessions. The state enjoyed an indefinite right to the property of its members; the lawgiver in Plato declared "ye are not your own, still less is your property your own." In Sparta the exclusive training for war admitted of no manner of earning money by business. In Athens the poorer class had so exclusively the upper hand of the rich that the latter had to provide the public with entertainments of sacrificial solemnities, largesses of corn, and banquets. "The demos," says the author of the "Gentile and the Jew," "understood the squeezing of the rich like sponges." Greece was the paradise of the poor. It is therefore to be expected that the sculpture of the day, though employed sometimes upon the decoration of thrones or state seats, chariots, chests, looking-glasses, tripods, as the painting was on walls, vases, and movable pictures on panels, should have been employed mostly in temples and, with occasional exceptions, on objects of some public use. The chest described above was kept as a relic, and the elaborately carved thrones in the temples were those of the statues of gods and heroes. Ivory and gold laid over a substructure of olive wood were the materials quite as frequently used by great sculptors as marble or bronze for statues which did not form parts of the actual decorations of their architecture. In later times these materials were used in sumptuous furniture. The Greeks used couches for sleeping and resting upon, but not for reclining on at meals, till the Macedonian period. We give two or three examples, from marbles: one of which resembles the modern sofa. Women sat always, as in Rome, sometimes on the couch at the head or foot, on which the master of the house or a guest reclined, generally on chairs. Besides chairs like the one represented here, the Greeks made arm-chairs; and folding chairs of metal. In the Parthenon frieze Jupiter is seated in a square seat on thick turned legs, with a round bar for a back, resting on short turned posts fitted into the seat. The arms are less high than the back; they are formed by slight bars framed into the uprights at the back, and resting on winged sphinxes. [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] Mirrors of mixed metal alloys, silver, tin, and copper, have come down to our times in great numbers. They were made occasionally in pure silver, and in gold probably among the Greeks as they were in later times among the Romans. The cases are of bronze, and engraved with figure designs of the highest character. There is, however, no proof that these were used as furniture in houses, as in Rome. They are hand mirrors, and the description of them, as works of art, belongs rather to that of antique bronzes. The woodcut shows the usual type, with the richly ornamented handle. [Illustration] Designs of the Greek couch, whether for sleeping or for reclining at meals, are abundant on tomb paintings, and sculptures, and on the paintings of vases. In the British museum we may see a large vase in the second vase room, on which a couch for two persons is arranged with a long mattress covered with rich material, lying within what appears to be a border of short turned rails with a cushion on each end, also covered with rich striped material. A long low stool decorated with ivory lies below the couch as a kind of step. The legs, as in many vase representations, are thick turned supports with lighter parts below, and a turned knob at the foot. On another vase Dionysus reclines on a thick round cushion at the head of the couch, while Ariadne sits on it. Figures feasting or stretched in death on similar couches can be seen in two beautiful and perfect funeral chests in the Ægina room. All these pieces of furniture seem made of or decorated with ivory, and furnished with coloured cushions or coverings of an oriental character. Tripods were made of bronze in great number for sacred use, and probably also as the supports of brasiers, tables, &c., in private houses. The tables were of wood, marble, and metal; the supports being either lion or leopard legs and heads, or sphinxes with lifted wings, a favourite form in Greek ornamentation. With regard to Greek houses generally, their arrangements differed very little from the earlier houses of the Romans. The bas-relief in the British museum--Bacchus received as a guest by Icarus--represents a couch with turned legs, the feet of which are decorated with leaf work; a plain square stool, perhaps the top of a box, on which masks are laid, and a tripod table with lion legs. The houses in the background are tiled. The windows are divided into two lights by an upright mullion or column, and a bas-relief of a charioteer driving two horses ornaments a portion of the wall, and may be intended for a picture hung up or fixed against the wall. The whole shows us an Athenian house, decked for a festive occasion, and garlands and hangings are festooned round its outer walls. The Greek chariot was of wood, probably similar to that of the Egyptians. It had sometimes wheels with four strong spokes only, as in the woodcut. The chariot wheel of the car of Mausolus, in the British museum, has six. The Ninevite wheels have sometimes as many as twelve, as may be seen in the sculptured bas-reliefs of the narrow Assyrian gallery of the British museum. [Illustration] The woods used by the Greeks for sculpture were ebony, cypress, cedar, oak, _smilax_, yew, willow, _lotus_, and citron. These materials were rarely left without enrichments of ivory, gold, and colour. The faces of statues were painted vermilion, the dresses, crowns, or other ornaments were gilt or made in wrought gold. CHAPTER III. THE ROMANS. The splendour that surrounded the personal usages of the earlier races of antiquity, the Egyptians, Ninevites, Persians, Greeks, and Tuscans, was inherited by the Romans. Not only did they outlive those powers, but they absorbed their territory as far as they could reach it; they affected to take in their religions and deities to add to their own system; they drained the subject populations for slaves, and eagerly adopted from them every art that could administer to the magnificence and luxury of their own private life. They have left both written records in their literature and actual examples of their furniture, made in metal or of marble. The discovery of Herculaneum and of Pompeii has given us not only single pieces of furniture, but very considerable remains of houses, shops, streets, fora or open public places of assembly, theatres, and baths. It is in such evidences of Roman social life that we shall find the materials for our present inquiry. The Romans spent their earlier ages in unceasing struggles for independence and dominion: and so long as the elder powers of Italy survived to dispute the growth of Roman greatness, there could not be much expansion of private wealth or splendour in the houses of Roman citizens. Though surrounded by splendid social life among the Etruscans, the Roman people long remained exceptionally simple in personal habits. It was after the Punic wars that oriental luxuries found their way into Italy along with the Carthaginian armies. Tapestry is said to have been first brought to Rome by Attalus, the king of Pergamus, who died B.C. 133 possessed of immense wealth, and bequeathed tapestries, generally used in the east from the early ages, to the Roman citizens. When Augustus became emperor the conquest of the world was complete. Thenceforward military habits and simplicity of individual life were no longer necessary to a state that could find no political rivals. The great capital of the world absorbed like a vast vegetable growth the thought, the skill, and the luxuries of the whole world. Nothing was too valuable to be procured by the great Roman nobles or money-makers, and nothing too strange not to find a place and be welcome in one or other of their vast households. While this was so at Rome in chief, it must be remembered that other capitals were flourishing in various countries, as wealthy, as luxurious in their own way and degree, only less in extent and means, and lacking that peculiar seal of supremacy that gives to the real capital a character that is never attained in subordinate centres of civilisation. Antioch was such a centre in the east; Alexandria in the south. Both these great cities contained wealthy, refined, and luxurious societies. Both were known as universities and seats of learning. Antioch was the most debauched and luxurious; Alexandria the most learned and refined. They did not exactly answer to the distinct capitals of modern kingdoms and states, such as we now see flourishing in Europe, to London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or St. Petersburg, because no one supreme state or city predominates over them; and further still, no one draws the pick and choice of the intellect and refinement of the whole of Europe to absorb them into itself as Rome did in the old world. But, in those days, Antioch and Alexandria, one at the head of the wealth and splendour of Asia, the other representing Greek learning grafted on the ancient scientific and artistic traditions of Egypt, must have contributed much to the general fusion of "ideas" and notions on art and personal manners and customs in the capital of the Roman empire. The Roman house was of traditional plan, and consisted generally of two or more square enclosures surrounded by arcades, open to the air in the centre, but which openings could be closed in summer or winter by awnings when the courts were not large enough to include a garden, as the inner enclosure usually did. The house had in front a _vestibulum_, an open space covered by a verandah-shaped roof, sometimes enclosed by lattices, sometimes open. An _ostium_ or lobby inside the entrance-door, deep enough to contain a small porter's lodge on one side, led to an inner door which opened on the _atrium_. This court had an opening to the air, and a tank for rain water was sunk in the middle. Fountains with jets or falls of water were not uncommon, the ancients being well acquainted with the principle that water if brought from an elevation in pipes will force its way up to its natural level. Inside the _atrium_ was the _nuptiale_, the nuptial bed, and here were kept in earliest times the _penates_, household or family divinities, and the family hearth, though these sacred emblems were banished in the imperial times to distant parts of the house, and statues between the columns that supported the central roof supplied their place. The _atrium_ was the general reception-room, like the hall in mediæval houses, but not the dining-room. To this succeeded an inner open court, with porticoes or corridors running round, supported on columns, and with a fountain or basin, shrubs and flowers in the centre, like the courts of the Alhambra. This court provided four halls in the four corridors, which could be screened off by tapestries and curtains. The centre was shaded in summer by canvas or carpet awnings. In winter a wooden roof could be pushed over the open space. Between the two halls or courts was a chamber called the _triclinium_, or dining-room. These rooms were roofed with timber richly painted and gilt. The roofs either hung on beams projecting from the walls, or were supported by pillars, or were carried up to a high opening, sloping back to the walls so as to admit more light to the rooms, alcoves, or screened portions furthest removed from the opening. Occasionally they were covered in wholly with a testudo-shaped roof, and in such cases lighted, perhaps, by dormers, though it is not quite clear how light was provided for in such constructions. Roman rooms were not floored with boards but paved with marble in large pieces, or in mosaic work made of small dies or squares. Coarse specimens of such work manufactured in our own times are laid down in the museum at Kensington, and fragments of the old work may be seen there on the walls. Occasionally these mosaics represent the house watch-dog chained, or the fable of Ganymede, or hunting scenes, sometimes finished with the utmost nicety. The _triclinium_ took its name from the three couches or sofas, on each of which three persons reclined during meals. Later, and in sumptuous palaces, several dining-rooms were built out beyond the inner courts. The engraving, a reconstruction, will give a fair idea of the general character of a richly furnished Roman house. First, is the _atrium_, into which smaller chambers open; next, the _triclinium_, to the left of which is a cabinet; and beyond is the _peristylium_, with its lofty colonnades. This last apartment was large and open; often planted with shrubs and trees, or containing statues, flowers in pots and vases, and surrounded by a corridor. As these courts were of various sizes they were, no doubt, in Rome on a scale out of all proportion to those found at Pompeii; were fewer or more in number, and rooms were added as the proprietor could acquire ground for building, often a difficulty in the older parts of the city. Something of this ground plan survives in a few of the very ancient Roman churches, as in that of S. Pudenziana, formerly the house of the senator Pudens, with vestibules, open courts, &c. [Illustration] Around the inner court, in the sumptuous Roman houses and the country villas of the patricians, were built other rooms, dining-halls, no longer called _triclinium_ but _triclinia_ in the plural, as admitting more than the number of nine persons reclining on the conventional three couches, to dine at once. In the city itself room was probably wanting in private houses for such expansion, the houses being in streets already laid out. In the villas there was no such restriction. These halls were built to face different quarters of the compass and to be used according to the season. _Verna_ and _autumnalis_ looked to the east, _hyberna_ to the west, _æstiva_ to the north. _[OE]ci_ were other rooms still larger; and glass windows were to be found in them. In a painting now in the Kensington museum, n^{o.} 653, given by the emperor Napoleon the third, glazed windows can be distinguished, divided by upright mullions and transoms of wood, such as were constructed in English houses in the seventeenth century. The sleeping-rooms, _cubicula_, were small closets rather than rooms, closed in general by curtains or hangings, and disposed about the sides of the rooms between the courts, or round the outer courts themselves. Besides the living and sleeping chambers, there were store-rooms for various kinds of food. Wearing apparel was kept in _vestiaria_, wardrobe rooms, fitted especially to store them in. It is doubtful whether the dresses were in chests: more probably in presses, or hanging on pegs. The ornamental woodwork in some of these rooms was rich in the extreme. The outer vestibule was protected by an overhanging balcony or by the projecting rafters of the roof of the first portion of the house, according as rooms were built over that portion or not. It was in some instances enclosed by carved or trellised woodwork. The doors were generally in two halves and could be closed with locks, which in the age of the empire were thoroughly understood, with latchets secured by a pin or with a wooden bar. The term _obserare_ was used when the security of a bar was added. The hinge was a pin or peg at the top and bottom which turned in a socket. Metal hinges strapped over the wood frame were not unknown: and bronze hinges are in the collection of the British museum. The decoration of the door, which was of wood, consisted principally of bronze mounts. The doorposts were ornamented with carving, sometimes inlaid with tortoiseshell and other rich materials. The woodwork was painted. Bedrooms were closed with doors; oftener by curtains. The windows were generally closed with shutters, hinged and in pairs. They were some six feet six inches above the level of the street, not beyond reach of the knocks and signals of friends outside. Wooden benches were usually provided in the vestibule. Besides the inlaid door frames, the ceilings of all the Roman rooms were very richly decorated. In more simple constructions the wood joists of the floor above, or the structure of the roof when no room surmounted it, were shown and painted; but in richer houses the timbers were covered with boards, and formed into coffers and panels, painted, gilt, and inlaid with ivory. This splendid system of decoration dates from the destruction of Carthage. Curved bearers from the upper part of the walls were added to form one kind of ceiling (_camara_), for which Vitruvius gives directions; and glass mosaics, like those used in the pavements, were inlaid on a plaster bed in the coffers. The cornices were of carved wood, or of plaster carved or modelled; the wood was always covered with a preparation of gesso, and gilt and painted like the walls. An examination of the remains of Roman glass found at Pompeii and elsewhere, and of which excellent examples may be studied in the Kensington museum, seems to point to the use not only of mosaics made of dies, but of mouldings, borders, and panels moulded in coloured glass of magnificent hues, and with the finest stamped ornaments. These were occasionally gilt, or were made in relief, or with a coat of opaque white glass over the translucent material, which could be cut and modelled in the manner of cameos, and helped further to decorate the ceiling, always one of the most splendid features of the room. The walls, when not painted, were sometimes hung with mirrors of glass blackened, or of silver, or of slabs of obsidian. They were of various sizes, sometimes large enough to reflect persons at full length. In the case of portable pictures, frames were added round them. Borders were certainly painted round frescoes. It is not to be supposed that paintings which could be exposed for sale, moved about, and hung up, could be finished round otherwise than by ornamental mouldings, or framework sufficient to protect and properly set them off. [Illustration] Among the ornamental pieces of furniture were tripods, three-legged frames, forming the supports of tables, of altars, of braziers, sometimes of pieces of sculpture. These were generally of bronze, and original pieces obtained in various parts of Italy can be seen in the bronze room of the British museum. Some of these much exceed the height of high modern tables. They are light, and ornamented on the upper ends with animal or other heads; some with the beginning of a hind leg about halfway down. They were, however, frequently movable, and, like the piece in the cut on the preceding page from an example in the British museum, were made to contract by folding; the stays which connect the legs internally slipping up and down them by means of loops. Such pieces might serve as table legs, or would hold altar pans or common fire pans or support pots of flowers. [Illustration] Besides tripods the reception rooms were ornamented with candelabra on tall stands of most graceful form and proportions. It will suffice to point to more than a dozen of examples in the British museum; and the woodcuts are from examples in other collections. The stems are a fluted staff or a light tree stem, commonly supported on three animal legs spread at the base, and branching out on the tops into one, two, or more boughs or hooks, with elegant modelled decorations or ending in flat stands. One has a slight rim round the dish or stand, on which a candelabrum or wax candlestick could be placed. In other cases the lamps were hung by their suspensory chains to the branches described. Other candelabra stands were of marble, six, eight, ten, or more feet in height, hybrid compositions of column caps, acanthus leaves and stems, on altar bases, &c., in great variety of design, of which engravings may be studied in the work of Piranesi. Casts, n^{os.} 93, 94 (antiques), are in the South Kensington museum. We do not know in what kind of repositories or pieces of furniture the ancient Romans kept their specimens of painting or their vases, some of which formed their most valued treasures. It is generally supposed that they were set on shelves fastened to the wall. On such shelves small images, boxes of alabaster or glass, and ornamental vases of all kinds were kept. Craters, sculptured vases on a large scale and made of bronze or marble, were also mounted on pedestals and ranged as ornaments with the statues. Bronzes and statues, pieces of sculpture that had fixed places, stood either along the walls of the reception rooms or under the eaves of the _compluvium_, whence light was obtained to set them off to advantage, and where turf, flowers, and fountains were in front of them. A vase or crater, nearly eight feet high, is in the hall of the British museum, brought from the villa of Hadrian at Palestrina; and in the entrance-hall of Nero's house there was a colossus 120 feet high, and long arcades and a tank or basin of water. But objects on this scale scarcely belong to the descriptions of what might be found ordinarily in houses of the great patricians. Sometimes a couch and a table of marble were placed close to the fountains in these delightful portions of the house. Tables were of many varieties in Rome, and enormous expenses were incurred in the purchase of choice pieces of such furniture. They were made of marble, gold, silver, bronze; were engraved, damascened, plated, and otherwise enriched with the precious metals; were of ivory, and of wood, and wood decorated with ivory; and in many other methods. Engraved (p. 26) is a very beautiful table found at Pompeii, and now at Naples. Tripods, terminal and other figures, made of bronze or marble; winged sphinxes, or leopards' and lions' legs, columns and other architectonic forms, were the supports on which these tables were fastened. Some had one central support only, in a few instances finished with animal heads of ivory. _Abaci_ were small tables with raised rims to hold valuables. Many tables were of cedar and on ivory feet. Horace speaks of maple, so also does Pliny, as a favourite wood for tables: birds'-eye maple especially was much prized. The planks and disks that could be cut from the roots and the boles of trees that had been either pollarded or otherwise dwarfed in growth in order to obtain wavy grain, knotted convolutions, &c., were in request. Veneers of well-mottled wood or of precious wood, small in scantling, were glued on pine, cedar, &c., as a base. These pollard heads, root pieces, &c., were bought at high prices, specially those of the _citrus_ or _cedrus Atlantica_. [Illustration] The point held to be desirable (says Pliny) in the grain of tables was to have "veins arranged in waving lines or else forming spirals like so many little whirlpools. In the former arrangement the lines run in an oblong direction, for which reason they are called _tigrinæ_, tiger tables. In the latter case they are called _pantherinæ_, or panther tables. There are some with wavy, undulating marks, and which are more particularly esteemed if these resemble the eyes of a peacock." Next in esteem to these was the veined wood covered or dotted, as it were, with dense masses of grain, for which reason such tables received the name of _apiatæ_, parsley wood. But the colour of the wood is the quality that was held in the highest esteem of all; that of wine mixed with honey was the most prized, the veins being peculiarly refulgent. The defect in that kind of table was _lignum_ (dull log colour), a name given to the wood when common-looking, indistinct, with stains or flaws. The barbarous tribes, according to Pliny, buried the citrus wood in the ground while green, giving it first a coating of wax. When it came into the workman's hands it was put for a certain number of days beneath a heap of corn. By this process the wood lost weight. Sea-water was supposed to harden it, and to act as a preservative. This wood was carefully polished by hand-rubbing. As much as £9,000 (a million of sesterces) was paid for one table by Cicero. Of two that had belonged to king Juba, sold by auction, one fetched over £10,000. These were made of citrus (_Thuya articulata_ or _cedrus Atlantica_). We hear of two made for king Ptolemæus of Mauritania, the property of Nomius, a freed man of Tiberius, formed out of two slices or sections of the _cedrus Atlantica_ four feet and a half in diameter, the largest known to Pliny; and of the destruction of a table, the property of the family of the Cethegi, valued at 1,400,000 sesterces. [Illustration] The Roman patricians and their ladies sat on chairs and reclined on couches when not at meals. In the _atrium_ under the broad roofed corridors, and in the halls not used for eating, were couches, such as the couch of which we give a woodcut, of bronze or of precious woods; the bronze damascened with ornaments of the precious metals, or of metal amalgam; the wood veneered or inlaid with marquetry or tarsia work of ivory, ebony, box, palm, birds'-eye maple, beech, and other woods. The chairs were of different kinds and were used for various occasions. The _atrium_ contained double seats, single seats, and benches to hold more than one sitter; chairs that either folded or were made in the form of folding chairs, such as could be carried about and placed in the chariot, _curules_. The woodcut shows the general fashion of a state or ceremonial chair; from the marble example in the Louvre. [Illustration] This woodcut is of the _sella_, a seat or couch, made of wood, with turned legs; it is intended, probably, for one person only, and has no need of a footstool. It has been covered with a cushion. [Illustration] _Scamnum_ was a bench or long seat of wood, used in poorer houses instead of the luxurious _triclinium_ of the men or arm-chairs of the women, for sitting at meals or other occasions. Seats were placed along the walls in the _exedræ_ or saloons; marble benches in most cases, sometimes wooden seats; particularly also in the alcoves that were constructed in the porticoes of baths and public buildings, where lectures of philosophers were listened to. The Romans had hearths in certain rooms. Numerous passages in ancient writers, to which it is needless to refer, concur in showing that the hearth was a spot sacred to the _lares_ of the family, the altar of family life. It was occasionally made of bricks or stone, and immovable, on which logs could be heaped. It seems doubtful whether chimneys were used in the Roman houses; probably occasionally. Writers on Roman antiquities speak of such rare constructions used, perhaps, as ventilators to the kitchen. The usual method of warming was by means of a brazier, of which an example found at Cære, in Etruria, is preserved
{'title': 'Ancient and Modern Furniture and Woodwork by John Hungerford Pollen', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}