Everything you need to know about collecting Gothic and Renaissance furniture

Gothic furniture pieces were created as cathedrals at a human scale. High-style Medieval furniture was made by the same joiners and woodcarvers who fashioned the magnificent choirstalls and wood sculpture in Gothic churches and cathedrals, bringing the grammar of sacred architecture to secular objects. By the fourteenth century, the Gothic had become the predominant international style across all Europe, its most sublime elements — including pointed arches, tapering pinnacles, delicate tracery and finely carved fleurons — appearing in nearly every art form, from architecture and sculpture to painting, textiles, manuscript illumination, metalwork and arms and armour. Even the smallest tabletop box might feature tiny posts along its sides, a miniature version of the stone buttresses supporting a cathedral wall.

Around the turn of the sixteenth century, designers in Southern Europe pioneered a new style not based on the architecture of cathedrals, but instead on the legacy of Classical Rome. Raphael himself was especially influential — in the 1510s, his workshop painted the Vatican logge with a complete design scheme based on grottesche, fanciful arrangements of masks, sphinxes, shields, flowers and other motifs based on ancient frescos newly discovered in Nero’s Palace on the Oppian Hill. Prints of grotesque design circulated widely throughout Europe and, soon, ‘Raphaelesque’ decoration appeared carved onto chests, credenzas and all manner of furniture.

‘Although the underlying construction of Gothic and Renaissance furniture is quite similar, their decoration could not be more different,’ Christie’s specialist Peter Hall explains. ‘Neoclassical furniture is usually seen as a development of the eighteenth century, expressed in the works of Robert Adam or the taste of the Louis XVI court. But its origins were those makers working in sixteenth-century Italy, motivated by the same principles of harmony, elegance and love of the Antique.’

Most surviving Gothic furniture dates to the gothique flamboyant period, when ornamentation reached its peak in church and cathedral architecture. Woodcarvers took full advantage of their soft medium, which allows for crisper and more fluid linework than the stone used in masonry, and enriched every surface with flowing, elaborate decoration. A Gothic chest might be covered in a fractal pattern of ogee arches enclosing smaller arches, or a row of impressive rose windows, filled with swirling curves and counter-curves. As decoration evolved during the Renaissance, the bold new motifs appearing on furniture, from acanthus and anthemion to lion masks and classical figures, were carved with equal virtuosity.

In the Gothic period, the iron locks and hinges on a piece of furniture could be bold and graphic, or minutely detailed and jewel-like. The iron box of a lock was made by a serrurier, who often covered it with open lacework or sculptural dragons, figures or miniscule architecture. Some examples even show traces of gilding, reflecting their great value when they were made.

Many pieces were held together with iron straps, conceived with no less artistic intent than the famous strapwork on cathedral doors. Their design is valuable to art historians, as it can identify the locale where a piece was made: Westphalia, for example, is famous for its bold, graphic straps with flower-shaped terminals.

Authentic Gothic and Renaissance furniture is enormously scarce, especially on the open market. Wood objects are vulnerable to fire, flood and the wear of regular use, but, just as importantly, subject to alteration and even reassembly into different objects.

‘The story of Gothic and Renaissance furniture is, in part, the story of its slow detachment from the structure of the wall into movable objects,’ Hall says. ‘Most pieces surviving today have been repaired, expanded or reduced in size, or show evidence of being previously architecturally fitted. These objects are still genuinely historic — this kind of alteration is quite typical and is valuable as a good indicator of age. It also means, however, that truly untouched pieces are exceptionally rare.’

Wealthy Europeans of the Middle Ages accumulated large amounts of precious plates, as well as rare glass and ceramic drinking vessels, which they displayed prominently on their furniture. This practice was not done for ostentation, but rather as a sign of hospitality to guests.

Paintings and manuscript illuminations from the period serve as a primary source, showing how chests, armoires and forms of cabinets variously called buffets, dressoirs and credences would be draped with cloth and provide pride of place for their owner’s treasures. Some pieces were constructed with tiered shelves to create an effect of great abundance, governed by rules of etiquette: a baron might spread his silver across two tiers, whereas a prince had the right to use four. The fabric coverings, though lost, may live on in the decoration of the wood: many panels were carved with parallel pleats of cloth, now called linenfold paneling.

Gothic and Renaissance styles were both later revived, most prominently by nineteenth-century architects such as Augustus Pugin and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. ‘The Gothic and Renaissance revivals were based on serious study of the past,’ Hall says, ‘and produced some extraordinarily beautiful works. These objects, however, reflect their own time just as much as the periods revered by their makers — and deserve to be appreciated separately from their earlier prototypes.’