SPAIN, LATE 15TH/16TH CENTURY

This cabinet is a fine example of a type of luxurious furniture in fashion in 15th and 16th century Spain. It is decorated with a particularly intricate inlay work called taracea of which the drawers and interior of the fall front panel display a fine illustration. The stellar motifs, and especially those of the three central drawers articulated within interlocked squares themselves set within polygons precisely remind the decoration of a cabinet a Nasrid cabinet now kept the the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Dijon. That cabinet appears to be a very early Nasrid example of inlaid furniture and is attributed to the 14th century. A number of other pieces are known, including three chairs: one is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogued as 16th century (Otto Kurz, 'Folding Chairs and Koran Stands' in Richard Ettinghausen (ed.), Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, 1972, no. 10, pp.304-05). The other, catalogued as 14th-15th century, is the Museo de la Alhambra in Granada (Arte Islamico en Granada, exhibition catalogue, Granada, 1996, no.188, pp.436-37) and one was sold at Christie’s King Street, 7 April 2011, lot 119 which was carbon dated with a 95% probability that it dates from 1470-1670. It casts light on the extant group, suggesting a broad but slightly adjusted cataloguing of late Nasrid or Post-Nasrid with a terminus anti quem slightly later than might otherwise be expected. A painting in the National Portrait Gallery by Gerlach Flicke of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, gives some help in limiting this broad dating. Painted in 1546, it shows the archbishop seated in a very similar chair and gives an idea of when the type of chair was in vogue and that this fashion had reached outside the Spanish borders.

Another chest, exhibited in Berlin at the Kunstgewerbemuseum shares the same attribute as ours, notably the lay out and construction of the drawers as well as the locking system. Within each cabinets the drawers are arranged in three rows, the uppermost row accommodating the smaller drawers and the lowermost the larger. All are inlaid with micro mosaic composed of stellar motifs within interlocked squares fitted in polygons. Both iron lock plates share the same escutcheon-like form with the locking bar running through the plates all the way to the side of the keyhole. The cabinet is dated to circa 1500 (see Christoph Rust, Mobel fur Sammler, Schatzastchen Kabinettschrank, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kultrubesitz, exhibition catalogue, Berlin 1989, pp. 29-38).

This technique of micromosaic inlay (taracea) was used in Spain and North Africa - appearing as early as the 10th century, on the minbar of the Great Mosque of Cordoba dating to its enlargement under al-Hakim II (961-976 AD). Caliphal marquetry workshops continued to execute court commissions uner the Almoravids and the Almohads and contributed to the splendour of the minbars in the Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez and those of Kutubiyya and the Qasba mosques in Marrakech (Jerrilyn D. Dodds, Al-Andalus, The Art of Islamic Spain, New York, 1992, p.373). To achieve this effect of micro-marquetry the artisan would produce thin rods of various material and work them in either square or triangle before plunging them in baths of coloring agents. The rods would then be bound together in order to form patterns and debited in thin slices before being inlaid (https://mba.dijon.fr/sites/default/files/odm_decembre_4.pdf, accessed 20/08/2014).