Furnishing the Home of Good Taste | Page 5

the best thoughts
which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century
owes much of its grave dignity and influence."[A]
[A] Walter Pater: "Studies in the Renaissance."
It is to this unity of the arts we owe the fact that the art of beautifying

the home took its proper place. During the Middle Ages the Church had
absorbed the greater part of the best man had to give, and home life was
rather a hit or miss affair, the house was a fortress, the family
possessions so few that they could be packed into chests and easily
moved. During the Renaissance the home ideal grew, and, although the
Church still claimed the best, home life began to have comforts and
beauties never dreamed of before. The walls glowed with color,
tapestries and velvets added their beauties, and the noble proportions of
the marble halls made a rich background for the elaborately carved
furniture.
The doors of Italian palaces were usually inlaid with woods of light
shade, and the soft, golden tone given by the process was in beautiful,
but not too strong, contrast with the marble architrave of the doorway,
which in the fifteenth century was carved in low relief combined with
disks of colored marble, sliced, by the way, from Roman temple pillars.
Later as the classic taste became stronger the carving gave place to a
plain architrave and the over-door took the form of a pediment.
Mantels were of marble, large, beautifully carved, with the fireplace
sunk into the thickness of the wall. The overmantel usually had a
carved panel, but later, during the sixteenth century, this was
sometimes replaced by a picture. The windows of the Renaissance were
a part of the decoration of the room, and curtains were not used in our
modern manner, but served only to keep out the draughts. In those days
the better the house the simpler the curtains. There were many kinds of
ceilings used, marble, carved wood, stucco, and painting. They were
elaborate and beautiful, and always gave the impression of being
perfectly supported on the well-proportioned cornice and walls. The
floors were usually of marble. Many of the houses kept to the plan of
mediæval exteriors, great expanses of plain walls with few openings on
the outsides, but as they were built around open courts, the interiors
with their colonnades and open spaces showed the change the
Renaissance had brought. The Riccardi Palace in Florence and the
Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, are examples of this early type. The
second phase was represented by the great Bramante, whose theory of
restraining decoration and emphasizing the structure of the building has

had such important influence. One of his successors was Andrea
Palladio, whose work made such a deep impression on Inigo Jones. The
Library of St. Mark's at Venice is a beautiful example of this part. The
third phase was entirely dominated by Michelangelo.
The furniture, to be in keeping with buildings of this kind, was large
and richly carved. Chairs, seats, chests, cabinets, tables, and beds, were
the chief pieces used, but they were not plentiful at all in our sense of
the word. The chairs and benches had cushions to soften the hard
wooden seats. The stuffs of the time were most beautiful Genoese
velvet, cloth of gold, tapestries, and wonderful embroideries, all
lending their color to the gorgeous picture. The carved marriage chest,
or cassone, is one of the pieces of Renaissance furniture which has
most often descended to our own day, for such chests formed a very
important part of the furnishing in every household, and being large
and heavy, were not so easily broken as chairs and tables. Beds were
huge, and were architectural in form, a base and roof supported on four
columns. The classical orders were used, touched with the spirit of the
time, and the fluted columns rose from acanthus leaves set in an urn
supported on lion's feet. The tester and cornice gave scope for carving
and the panels of the tester usually had the lovely scrolls so
characteristic of the period. The headboard was often carved with a
coat-of-arms and the curtains hung from inside the cornice.
Grotesques were largely used in ornament. The name is derived from
grottoes, as the Roman tombs being excavated at the time were called,
and were in imitation of the paintings found on their walls, and while
they were fantastic, the word then had no unkindly humorous meaning
as now. Scrolls, dolphins, birds, beasts, the human figure, flowers,
everything was called into use for carving and painting by genius of the
artisans of the Renaissance. They loved their work and felt the beauty
and meaning of every line they made, and so it came about that when,
in the course of years,