CNC Machine

CNC is an anagram for "[real] Carving Necessitates [carving] Chisels"
(Carving Necessitates Chisels)

In the last post, the roof and one leg of the chest had just been finished. That was more than four months ago. Wow, the time really flies! Even though nothing else has been posted, I have not been sitting idle on my medieval projects.

I finished up the legs around the end of January, but then went out of town to do a job, anyway, they did not seem significant enough to warrant their own post. When I returned, I sawed up some panels (by hand) to for the sides and then started carving here and there as time and work permitted. They will eventually be fit into grooves in the the posts, but I decided to do the carving before doing the mortises on the posts, so that I would not accidentally break off the shoulders whilst carving.

7th century box lid and corner posts

7th Century box, the carving is underway. In the background one can see a
print-out of a Langobard panel, in the Church of Santa Maria, Civita
 Castellana, in Italy which I based my panel on.

7th century box, completed front panel
this depicts a wild boar hunt

7th Century box, Front panel detail. I love the way the frantic activity
of the dogs have been portrayed, albeit in a rather impressionistic way.

In the original Lombard panel, there was one additional standing figure and the trees extended further to the right, over his head. The scene was nearly perfect for the format of my box, but if I had made it exact, that figure would have been cut in half. The solution was to space everything just a bit wider, eliminate the forth figure and then shorten the branches of the tree so they fit within the space. This still left an unsatisfactory void to the right of the last figure. Taking a clue from the original artist, who had too much space below the spear-man, and thus left that area uncarved, I did not carve the right-hand edge straight in order to not have too much blank field beside that figure.

Red line showing what would be a straight edge to the field

In carving this panel, I realised that there is a lot more detail than one notices at a glance. I also realised, that even though it looks "simple" it is technically nearly as complicated as any "classical" carving. There are many subtleties which are not readily obvious, but where details are important to the scene, they have been rendered with care, such as the horses' bridals and trappings. Another factor which greatly increases the complexity of the process is the depth to which the background is sunk. If this were shallow, it would be fairly easy and take much less time, but the ground is sunk, in the scale of my work, at about 7 to 9mm. It is not easy to remove and clean out corners and small places at that depth but this was a very common characteristic of early medieval relief sculpture so I followed it.

I considered posting about this panel once I had finished it, but decided that I could get the next one done fairly quickly. "After all", I thought, it was "just circles and flowers, mostly" (I never learn) which should be fairly easy to carve, right? It took me a lot more time, again in large part due to the depth of the grounding. This panel is patterned after a panel which is, or was, in Berlin, but came from Rome, originally. I have no idea if it survived the war because I can find no modern mention of it, the original of what I used (found on an internet archive site) was taken "before 1920".

7th Century box, back panel nearing completion. I draw the simpler elements
directly on the wood, but the birds, which are more complex, I drew on paper
and then pasted that to the timber.

The original from which I based my panel on (It is marble)

7th Century box, back panel. I chose this design for two reasons, number one,
I liked it, and number two, because it worked perfectly in the space that I had
to work with. I believe this was a large factor in determining a lot of original
medieval decoration, not so much in the supposed meaning that modern
art historians and analysers want to attach to them. 

It is true that some symbols and patterns had special or significant meaning, but artist have always worked with and influenced decorative trends. It is no accident that much art of the 6th through 10th century utilised interlacing straps and bands, because this was one of the stylistic trends of the times, but like most other elements of design, sooner or later,  even long-winded popular elements fall out of fashion and are discarded. I came across several early medieval panels, with designs similar to my box design, which had been re-purposed in the 16th and 17th century. Apparently the busyness of the grooved strap-work was offensive to 17th century taste, however, and the panels were ground flat enough to remove all or most of the grooves.

Detail of a defaced 8th century marble panel incorporated into a
17th century altar in Chur Cathedral, Switzerland
I chose this part because it most clearly shows that it formerly
had the two grooves dividing the strap into three lines.
Sadly much of the detail of other elements, not so easily imagined,
were also forever obliterated - all in the name of contemporary taste.

Because I believe there is no particularly significant or special meaning to the design of this panel, (It is ornament, for ornament's sake), I felt no reason to rigidly adhere to it. (Besides, I hate blind copying of anything) I did notice, however that there seemed to be some thought given to the layout of the original design, and possible evidence of a "screw-up" along the way. In the bottom row, the same basic bird is repeated, in the same position each time, but every one of them has its own details which sets him apart as unique from his neighbours. In the middle row, there is a deliberate act of alternation one fruit and one rosette, throughout that grouping. Each flower and fruit is again rendered unique to itself. The first has 8 pointed petals, the second 7 with alternating pointed and round, and the third has all rounded tips, again with 8 petals. Two more rosettes in the top row are also individual.

The top row is where some seeming randomness and lack of reason is found. It begins with a bird on the left and ends with a bird on the right. I believe that the artist was like me, and was a bit dyslexic and confused by odd and even numbered repeats. If one has an odd number of objects in a row, the first and last can be the same, but if there are an even number of repeats, then what is on one end, cannot be on the other, leaving a bit of asymmetry to the overall design. (I have made this mistake myself in trying to lay out patterns) It is my belief that the artist wanted to have a bird on either end of the design but was also intending to alternate bird and flower. He began by carving from the left side, at the bottom, following his plan, as he progressed, however, he made adjustments to it. I deduct this from the fact that the first two "fig leaves" in the bottom row, and the first one in the top row are simpler than the others. As he worked on the design, he realised that his scale was large enough to give the leaves more detail, and so he began doing so. When he got to the top row, for some reason, he skipped to the far end, and again carved a bird, forgetting that a rosette should finish up the row begun with a bird. Once the mistake was begun, there was no way of correcting it.

Since I am speculating and hypothesising, and there is no way to "prove" or disprove my theory, I will go one step further and point out the second from the left element, which is not a "rosette" as I have named the others. One would say that it is a "Cross" and so it may be, but it may also fall into the general "flower" designs, and was used because the artist could not think of any other variation on the rosette than what he had already used.

It is interesting, however, to see that both the "flower" element and the "cross" element go way back in history. I have found evidence for both of these motifs in Assyrian art from at least 2000 BC. It seems, according to what I have read, that the cross within a circle represented the rays of the sun as obscured by the moon in an eclipse. As time went on and artists did what artist do best, the design was modified to include circles or dots within the void created by the quadrants of the crossed arms, and then the dots gave way to swirls in Celtic art. I have seen many variations on this theme from Celtic, Assyrian, Dacian, Scythian, Etruscan and Greek art, all long before the adoption of this symbol as the central motif of the Christian religion.

Two Greek Vases, one showing Celtic influence in the cross ornament, the
inside of two Etruscan cups, and a Celtic metal ornament, all showing this
as a form of decoration from several hundred years BC

Cross-shaped ornament

Since by the early Middle Ages, this cross motif had been adopted by Christianity, this was an appropriate element to incorporate within a panel intended for a church, but was in no wise intended for anything other than decorative elements within the broader field of ornamental work. It was simply part of the contemporary artists repertoire.

Videre Scire

Varnished Furniture In the Middle Ages

Not so long ago Steffen and I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see what they had to offer in their medieval collection. The trip there took more than two hours, and we had to be back home at a reasonable time due to the fact that he has a family, so I was mostly taking pictures instead of studying what was on exhibit.

If I have limited time in a museum I tend to operate in a "shoot first, look later" sort of mode. When 'later' came, and I was studying my pictures, I was pleasantly surprised to see a detail that I had never noticed in any paintings before. In this painting, by an anonymous Flemish painter working in the last quarter of the 15th century, I saw evidence of a highly polished furniture surface.

It is amazing what you can find in a painting if you
spend the time to study it

This is important, and I make mention of it, because most people seem to assume that (unpainted) medieval furniture was dull and dry, either entirely unfinished or perhaps only having a single coat of linseed oil, which gives not sort of gloss to the surface.

Zoom one

Zoom 2; here you can see the lines of the drapery reflected in the surface

I looked through pictures of my own furniture and realised that ordinarily, the glossy surfaces that I work so hard to achieve do not really show up very well in photographs. This is important because it would be a detail that someone would probably not ordinarily put into a painting either. Below are a couple pictures of furniture which I know to have a very fine sheen of varnish to them because I made it, but that sheen is not well reflected in the photos.

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In the first picture, only the corner of the room causes a reflection line to

the top. The front is every bit as polished as the top is, however. In the second

picture, only the side reveals that the surface is shiny. This box has a very

bright French polish finish, but there is no reflection at all to the top surface

in this Photo. the third picture is of a chest which has a well polished and 

waxed finish, but shows no evidence of such.

Seeing this detail in the painting from Philadelphia, I looked through other pictures to see if I could find further examples which portrayed this characteristic. Sure enough, one of my pictures from the MET had a bench which also exhibited a highly polished surface.

Detail of a painting in the MET

Detail of the detail; here you can see that there are some reflections from the
book and the column behind; this painting represents a bench which would
have a polish every bit as bright and glossy as the one on the box
pictured above.

Cennino Cennini mentions varnish and Theophilus gives two recipes for making it. There is no real difference to his varnish recipe of the 11th century than there is to that which is in a book I have from the late 19th century.

If varnish existed, it must have been used; but for what. In Theophilus' writing he only specifically mentions using it on paintings, metal, and on doors, but it seems to me safe to assume that it would also have been used on furniture, and here are two 15th century examples which clearly show that it was. Once one sees these examples, and knows what he is looking for, there are bound to be others.

Detail of a 15th century painting and a model reproduction of the room

Above is a detail, found in Wikipedia, of the famous Anolfini Wedding, by Jan van Eyke; below it is a picture I found on the web, of someone's model of the room seen in the painting, perhaps used in a dollhouse. I show these two  pictures so that one can see that in the original painting there is actually 

much more highlights to the carving than is visible in the model, which has  a less polished finish. It requires very specific lighting from a sharp angle to achieve any sort of meaningful highlighting to a carved surface, as can be seen from the picture of my carved chest pictured above. It is a shame that I could not find a more clear picture of this painting, because the highlights on it are brighter than they look from this photo, but it definitely represents a varnished chair. Below is pictured a detail of a stool which I made, which exhibits some of the same highlight details from direct overhead light (the sun); much like the direct side-lighting which illuminates the objects in the painting.

A brightly polished piece of furniture under strong
direct lighting shows up the carved edges as white
lines.

Knowing what to look for, and allowing for period stylistic trends, I now have more confidence to believe something that I have long suspected, which is that the details in this painting, by an anonymous 13th century Italian painter, exhibited in the Washington National Gallery, also represents an highly varnished chair.

Detail of a painting in the Washington National Gallery

My original reason for believing that this represented a highly varnished chair, when I first saw it 22 years ago, was because of the similarity of the treatment of the highlights on the fabric, which represent silk, and the highlights on the wooden parts. Now that I have seen later paintings which clearly demonstrate a varnished surface, and I know that varnish existed and was used, I have no reason to doubt that this is what is represented in this and other similar 13th century paintings. Much information put into paintings has been lost to us from the changes in painting techniques and the way we see and portray things.

Videre Scire

9th Century Furniture Ornamentation

Several years ago I came across the website for the Bibliothèque nationale de France and discovered a vast online collection of manuscripts. I spent months going through nearly every available 8th through 12th century work looking for images related to my field of the study of furniture, interiors, and decorative objects. I found a wealth of information which both confirmed my suspicions of the complexity and variety of objects and designs from that period, as well as providing a few examples to prove that things I expected had existed, but had never seen any examples of, were in fact in existence .

A few weeks ago, I was looking for an image that I knew I had, but could not locate in my files. After awhile, I decided the fastest way to find what I was looking for would be to go back to the source and look it up again. A lot has changed since the first time I visited the site, and I was delighted to see that, for many manuscripts, the website has been updated so that one can "zoom in" to even larger formats than had previously been available. This was great because in some pictures, one can now see details that were previously invisible at the resolutions in which they used to be displayed. A good example would be the details now revealed in this scene of St Mathew from folio 17v ('v' is for "verso" which is Latin for the back side of a page, and where we get the words 'obverse' and 'reverse' from)

St Mathew, from BNF Abeville MS 4 fol 17v ca 790-800 AD

The above image is as detailed as one was previously able to view, You can see that there is a chair with its ever present foot bench, a lectern, and an ink stand, you can also deduct that the  stand is made of metal, and the lectern seems to be made of part metal and part other materials. The decorations of the chair appear to be some sort of gold strips. The fact that the picture was painted on very expensive purple dyed velum does not actually help us in discerning the details, because at this resolution, areas where the paint has flaked away makes it difficult to distinguish between scratches and deliberate decorations.

Scrolling vine and bead decorations revealed in high resolution; this is from
the middle section of the left side of the plinth chair, near the hem of
St Mathew's robe

Acanthus leaf and other details of decoration on the chair and the lectern

One cannot download images at these higher resolution, but it is great to be able to view small details at four or five times their actual size. This helps greatly in compensating for more than 1200 years of wear and tear to the pictures. At this resolution, one can see that the stripes on the chair are actually moulding, with dots and gold scrolling vine decorations. The top moulded edge of the chair has an acanthus leaf design to it, and the bosses, or knobs of the lectern have five white dots; a "shorthand" way to indicate that these junctions also have carving or some other type of ornamentation to them.

As I sat studying these details, it dawned on me the type of ornamentation the artist had in mind when he painted this picture. I realised with that information, and comparing it with surviving objects made with the same techniques I could go a lot further than one typically can in visualising the actual appearance of these objects.

It must be made clear that any sort of hypothetical recreation is exactly that, hypothetical. Any time one sees a reconstructed drawing or model of anything from a car accident, 2nd Dynasty Egyptian temple, or a "3D" image of a dinosaur, the artist can only do the best he can with his knowledge of the subject and the information he has to hand. I am therefore not going to attempt to make a chair and claim it to be what this illustration represents, but I do wish, in this post, to point out actual objects and design elements from the same era, which will help you to get a better idea of what such a chair may have looked like for yourself. I also want to stress that usually artists were not trying to represent any particular chair, but rather they were illustrating the general appearance of a particular chair type. I strive to bring to life, in your mind, the complexity and sophistication available in a time that was supposed to be "crude" and "dark", and help you see what might have been since it no longer exists.

In studying these high-resolution details, the first thing I realised was that this image of St Mathew's chair represents a metal foil covered chair. Metalworking was one of the favourite mediums of ornamentation for many early medieval craftsmen working in several divers types of craft. This was a carry-over from the Celtic and Migration Peoples who had exploited the medium to phenomenal degrees of design and quality. The museums are full of bits and bobbles of every description, demonstrating the skill that early medieval artists had with the manipulation of sheet-metal. Most of what survives, though, are small items. This medium was used for larger objects too; everything from altars, buckets and crosses, to doors and chairs, were covered with punched, embossed, and repoussé work.

Metal covering from a Migration Period Chest (6-7th century)

I believe the above picture is an object in the Cathedral Treasury (Schatzkammer) Musem in Köln, but cannot remember for sure. I do know that I saw it on my trip, but I do not have a picture of it; pictures were forbidden in that museum (they take your camera and lock it up until you leave), so this must have been the place where I saw it. The above picture is one that I found on the web six or seven years ago, with no information about it, and have never seen any other picture of it since then, but when I saw it myself, on my recent trip, I recognised it at once. Wherever it is, it shows a metal covering for a small chest of a form seen in many 8th and 9th century manuscripts, as well as several Roman era mosaics and wall paintings. Though the ornamental style is different from that of our chair, it is based on the same sort of decorative scheme (an ornamented metal foil covering). Most of this sort of work survives as book covers and on small reliquary caskets, but there are enough of those to show that this sort of work was quite common, and like every other art form, there was a vast range of quality of workmanship as well as degrees of ornamental sophistication employed in their creation.

9th century Gilt copper casket in the Diözesanmuseum Ellwangen

The fundamentals of this sort of furniture begin with a wooden core. In the case of this sort of plinth chair, that core would be a basic box with  mouldings either applied or carved out of the solid. One of the things that would have historians all abuzz over such a chair, were one to have actually survived, would be its method of joinery. Based on that, they would try to establish a date for the object, but in principle, a chair like this could have been made at any point throughout the Middle Ages, and the only thing that would give it stylistic changes, would be in the manner of the decoration on the foil.

As I said, metal foil ornamentation was a very popular method of ornamenting things from pre-Christian times, well into the 13th century. This was so much so that it influenced the style of carving in other mediums at the onset of the Middle Ages. People often compare the flat low relief carvings of the early medieval period with the very three dimensional work of the high Roman period and dismiss it as, "crude" "primitive" and "unskilled". Some of it certainly was less well-executed than others, but overall, if one thinks about it, it can clearly be seen that this was a deliberate choice of sculpting stone to look like metal. Just as artists of the 1920's made a deliberate shift in the carving style and created the Art déco style, a deliberate shift was made away from the classical Roman styles, to create a new style that more suited the tastes and culture of the people who were the new dominating force of Europe. In all likelihood, the stone panel pictured below, which was part of a chancel screen in an Italian church, was either gilded or painted gold, giving it almost exactly the same appearance as the  foil-work decorations that the metalworkers were producing at the time.

A carved stone panel in the Musei Civici di Pavia
In a ll probability, this panel was originally gilt, or gold painted
giving it almost exactly the same appearance as embossed foil work. 

Below are a couple details from some 8th and 9th century work. I chose these two pictures because they show scrolling decorations similar to what the artist of St Mathew's chair had in mind. The first also shows the very popular use of a beaded border, which is also represented in the manuscript illustration. The second piece is much less accomplished than the first, but no apology is needed for it, not every work produced in any time period is of the highest quality. One should also, when viewing such items, bear in mind that they have usually been taken apart and put back together over the years, due to damage or deterioration of the wooden core, and that any piece of metal which has been continuously handled for 1200+ years will have inevitably suffered from dents, scratches, and crushing.

An embossed silver border around an ivory panel;
part of a 9th century book cover, and a wing of an embossed
foil-covered cross of the 8th or 9th century.

One of the methods employed in this sort of decoration was the use of dies, or "matrices" used to create repetitive designs in the metal. The scrolling border design as well as the central branching elements to the arm of the cross pictured above were created with these sort of ready made stamping dies. The artist tried to get creative with the die he used  in the centre by adjusting the spacing and over-stamping successively in order to get the design to narrow as it went towards the centre of the arm. The simplified acanthus leaf decoration to the book cover moulding is also created with these sort of  dies. 

Below, is an illustration of a piece of cruciform gold foil which has stamped design work on its entire surface. There are many of these gold crosses found in museums all over the world, and seem to have been popular from the 4th century to the 9th. They were apparently made as offerings, to hang in churches, and to place with the dead, in tombs and cemeteries. Most of the examples we have were recovered from burial sights. I show this object to illustrate how important ornamentation was to people in the Middle Ages, for any sort of object. It seems that a plain, flat sheet of metal would not due, and so some sort of design was stamped onto them. The workmen producing them were not interested in creating a magnificent work of art, they were just suffering from the "horror Vacui" syndrome, which is a dislike of blank, flat, or empty space, and felt the need to decorate these objects in a thrifty way. Unlike modern taste, medieval people did not like blank empty flat  surfaces, and spaces, and therefore, they decorated everything. This cross was made almost willy-nilly by a single stamping to each of its arms with a die that was much larger than the arm. The result is that the centre of the cross is a jumble of over-stampings of incoherent design. As I said, the point was to decorate a basically disposable object, not to make a 'work of art'.

No two arms of this cross were stamped with the die in the same position,
the result is that we can see much more of the pattern than would have been
visible had it been carefully made.

Enough about stamping; on to scrolling vines.

A section of relief carving an the wall of  Santa Maria de Lara in Spain
8th century

Some Columns, now in the Cluny Museum, from
the 6-7th century Notre-Dame de la Daurade.
Compare the capitals with the lectern of St Mathew.

So far, we have looked at several metal objects, but none of them seem to have the same sort of vine decoration that is suggested in the illumination of St Mathew. I am sure there are examples that exist, but I like showing a variety of materials in these blogs, to illustrate how the same sort of ornament was used in various mediums. I believe the above two illustrations capture the essence of what the artist had in mind even if the material happens to be stone.

The top edge of the chair is painted with a red-orange colour as its base. This is different from the gold of the main body of the chair, but that does not necessarily indicate anything more than that the artist wanted to add another colour to his painting. It could also indicate a different material, or a different coloured metal, if the edge is also to be interpreted as being made of metal. If that is the case, then copper foil would be a good guess. (There are several examples of 11th and 12th century altars made of bi-coloured gold and copper-foil in the museums of northern Europe.) This change of colour could also indicate that the seat of the chair is made of carved and painted wood. This would make practical sense, as the nailed on foil decorations would probably not stand up very well on the edge of a seat and the nails would easily catch on clothing. However with no surviving examples of such a chair, the best we can do is speculate. 

A carved acanthus border of a 9th century ivory panel from a box., now
on display in the MET. (Originally the birds and flowers were gilded.)

Regardless of the material that it is made of, the artist has clearly indicted, as can be seen from the supper magnified image above, that he wanted his chair to have an acanthus leaf decoration to its upper and lower mouldings. Wooden 9th century acanthus leaf carving is hard to come by, but there are numerous examples carved in ivory, a much more durable material. 9th century art consisted in a large part, of a contrast and/or a mixing of Classical and Migration Period styles. The illustration of St Mathew holds firmly to the design elements of the classical tradition, as does the decoration of the above pictured box panel, and the following picture, which is a detail of a comb from the 2nd half of the 9th century.

Detail from the so-called St Heriburt Comb, Cluny

We have mostly been focusing on the chair, but I did mention the similarity between the carved capitals pictured above, and the one illustrated as the support for the lectern. I also mentioned at the beginning that the little white dots represent ornamentation to the bosses, or "knobs" of the lectern. At the scale of the painting, it would have been nearly impossible, as well as completely pointless, for the artist to have painted more detail, he was not trying to give a photo-realistic representation of a chair and lectern. Perhaps something like the cup boss pictured below, could be what the artist envisioned in his painting.

The boss of a chalice, from one of the Attarouthi Treasure objects; these
were displayed at an exhibition at the MET

There is no way we can ever really know how plinth chairs of the 9th century looked, because there are none which have survived. Even if one or two had, the vast variety of ornament which was employed over the entire continent doubtless rendered tens if not hundreds of thousands of chairs, each one different to the next, but at the same time, all conforming to contemporary stylistic trends and regional variations. We can speculate endlessly on how any one of them might have looked, but careful examination of other objects produced at the same time will give us a much better starting point for that speculation.

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The Utrecht Psalter and its Furnishings - Part V

Once more we come to our occasional series examining the furniture found in the 9th century Utrecht Psalter, now housed in the Universiteitsbibliotheek, (University Library) Utrecht. This study is being conducted alphabetically, as I have labeled the different types of furniture, and we are now come to the letter 'P'. This is a significant classification, because as far as I know, I have coined the phrase "Plinth Chair" to designate a type of seat which is the single most popularly illustrated device used for seating prior to the 14th century, across all forms of medieval artwork, but which no history of furniture has yet to point out as a distinct form.

David composing the psalms. (detail of fol 1v)
In this illustration we see a plinth chair, a foot stool, and a desk.
both the chair and the desk are depicted as paneled furniture

Most people assume these plinth chairs to be chests; if a "chest" is completely synonymous to an enclosed square or rectangular box form, then perhaps they are chest. I strongly disagree with this narrow classification, however, as there are numerous medieval illustrations showing both chests and 'plinth chairs' in the same scene, with a distinctly different form, and manner of decoration. They are, in my opinion, no more "chests" than an "ottoman" (known also as a tuffet or hassock) is a chest, which is incidentally a modern version of the former. Modern refrigerators are basically of 'cabinet' form, yet one never sees them classified as such in furniture books. I introduced this form of seating by the name of "Plinth Chair" a couple years ago here, so there is no need to repeat myself completely.

St John from a 9th century gospel book, Rheims
Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal MS 1171 fol 164v
In this illustration one clearly seas the difference between the chest
and the chair.

In the Utrecht Psalter, there are at least 21 illustrations depicting no less than 25 separate chairs of this type. There is no need to show multiple illustrations of them here, because, in keeping with the general impressionistic nature of the illustrations in this work, they are all of near identical design, showing only the basic form. A few have, as the above illustration shows, the addition of the indication of paneled construction by way of a secondary rectangle drawn within the perimeter of the main body.

Unfortunately, no chair like this has survived from any time in the medieval period, which leaves most people, without a second thought, to assume the objects in these illustrations to be chests. As can be seen in the above illustration, though, this particular design would be very impractical as a chest in the sense that we usually think of them, for reasons such as the very pronounced overhang of the top and the large protruding moulded base. Many of these chairs are also depicted, as the above example, with curved or shaped sides. This is not to say that they could not have been used for storage, no example that I have found in artwork is detailed enough to prove or disprove this concept. In fact, there is no reason to doubt that some would have been used as such. Others, however, are depicted with open arcading or in other forms of semi-openness which indicates that even if some examples might have doubled as storage items, they were not all used as such, nor was that their primary function. Simply put, they are a distinct form of seating, made and used as such.

9th century ivory panel, formerly part of a book cover, now in the Louvre

The above ivory panel detail is great for two reasons, the first is that it shows four such chairs in various states from completely enclosed (top left) to completely open, having only a base, and seat connected by four legs. (lower left) The top right could either be paneled or having openings, and the lower right depicts a plinth chair with solid ends, but open sides. (part of the ivory has chipped off of this one) The second reason I like this carving is because of the chest in the centre which completely flies in the face of most people's concept of early medieval furniture. This is more of a 'cabinet' in size and shape, has a vault shaped lid, and carved post and panel constructed sides.

The idea that early furniture, including these plinth chairs, was necessarily "crude" or "primitive" is further dispelled by two more illustration, this time from a later 10th century manuscript now located in Strahov Monastery in Prague, but originating from Trier, Germany. I have cropped the pictures to allow the details to be readily visible. The artist (known as "Meister des Registrars Gregorium") has indicated mitred corners to the panels in the body of the chair, gold accent to the moulding, and a carved acanthus leaf panel in the second example which is all in gold leaf with painted moulding. Some of the gold leaf has been lost on the left edge, revealing the very carefully drawn details of the chair.

Two details from a Trier Gospel book, now housed in the Strahov Monastary
ca 980

These chairs are illustrated in every century of the Middle Ages, from the 6th (the beginning of the "medieval" period)...

6th century panel from Rome, still very much in the "antique"
style of the Roman era.
This chair is exactly the same as the two 10th century examples.

...to the 15th, which is the end of the Middle Ages. In fact, I have one example that I stumbled across from the middle of the 16th century, but cannot remember where I filed it.

From the British Library comes this early 15th century example
BL Yates Thompson MS 37 fol 103r 

This is an excellent illustration because it shows that just as in the 9th century, the artist made no real distinction between the altar (shown with two red tablets representing a diptych) and the chair. As I have mentioned many times before, the artists were usually not very concerned with details in book illustrations. In the Utrecht Psalter, the plinth chairs and altars have exactly the same form and only other associated items distinguish one (unoccupied) type of furniture from the other, just as the diptych does here.

As I have said, no such chair survives, so any attempt at reconstructing one would be purely speculative. Some clues to the type of ornament used, however, might come from carved stone panels of the same time period in question, such as this 10th century former altar frontal, shown below.

This carved stone altar panel might give some indication of what a moulded
wooden panel might have looked like.

I have no idea when these chairs first came into vogue, but throughout the course of the Middle Ages they remained extremely popular and survived well into our modern era. As times and tastes have changed, they have adapted to those changes in material and the application of ornament and finish, but their basic form held true for more than a thousand years. To me it is a great wonder that no one else has ever given them as much as a second thought or the place they deserve in books of furniture history.

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The Utrecht Psalter and its Furnishings - Part IV

In my ongoing, alphabetically organised discussion of the furniture and furnishings found in the Utrecht Psalter, we come to 'O', which is for organ, as in a pipe organ

One of three organs illustrated in the Utrecht Psalter
This one inferres levers and bellows for four people, though none are shown
pumping them and only two of the four handles are pictured

Some people might find this amazing, but the pipe organ is actually a very ancient instrument. It was supposedly invented in the 3rd century BC by Tesibius of Alexandria. However, as with many inventions of history, there were doubtless other instruments of similar principle which had already been in existence and which he either made improvements on, or which worked on a principle similar to a field he was famous for working in (hydraulics), and thus tradition came to associate that object with him,

This mosaic comes from the floor of a 3rd century Roman villa in the
 present-day town of Nennig, Germany. The villa was not destroyed
 until a Viking invasions of 882 meaning that the nobility of this region
would have had direct contact with this image for the first four 
centuries of the "Middle Ages"

However, and whenever the pipe organ came into being, there are numerous portrayals of organs of many forms and sizes from Greek and Roman art in many different mediums. According to The Organ; An Encyclopedia, the organ was "re-introduced" into Western Europe from Byzantium in the time of Pepin the Short, (in 757 AD) and Charlemagne. While these two incidents are recorded and thus textual evidence for actual events, the fact that they are illustrated in the Utrecht Psalter and the Stuttgart Psalter testify to them being fairly commonplace at the beginning of the 9th century. The above mentioned Encyclopedia also speaks of another, which was installed in Louis the Pius's palace by a "Venetian cleric" (826). There are also 9th century records of organs having been installed in an abbey in Bages, Catalonia, as well as in Köln, Halberstadt, and Rheims. Pope John the VIII requested an organ and an organist to be sent to Rome, from the Bishop of Freising, in 873. (Because of the nature of Humans and politics, this in no way implies that there was no one in Rome or Italy who could have done the job - notice the "Venetian cleric" cited above!)

The Encyclopedia goes on to cite (though a bit ambiguously) evidence of 8th, 9th and 10th century organ making in the British Isles. (This actually contradicts the author's statement that it was "re-introduced" to the "west" in the 9th century.)

In doing a bit of my own research for this blog, I came across several references, and pictures of the remains of a 3rd century Roman organ and a modern replica of it found in the National Museum in Budapest. It seems that it belonged to the dormitory of a fire brigade in the town of Aquicum (Budapest). The remains are in remarkably good condition given that the building was destroyed by fire (the ironies of history) and had then been buried from the 5th century until 1932.

The metal remains of organ pipes and mechanical parts of a 3rd century
Roman organ found in Aquicum (Budapest) in the 1930's. At right is a modern
interpretation of the organ based on contemporary artwork, but without any
decoration which would have originally been found on the wooden case 

This seems to be of a small personal sized organ, such as another portrayed in the Utrecht Psalter. (pictured below) One can deduce that just as in the later Middle Ages, and even today, there were many varieties and sizes of organs for different uses in the early medieval period.

An interesting note of the ever recurring battle of cultural "morality" and music comes from a quotation concerning St Jerome (342-420 AD) who advised a mother, regarding the virtuous upbringing of her young daughter, that she must "let her be deaf to the sound of the organ" for its "sensual" sounds would allow her to fall into a life of "committing every conceivable sin". Sounds like a Highway to Hell for sure. (rock on Angus!)

The third organ depicted in the Psalter is even larger than the first one pictured. It is shown with four pump operators and two organists. An organ such as the one the artist had in mind must have been spectacular to see and hear.

A small organ, quickly depicted with an economy of line. No doubt the artist
had an organ such as the Aquicum example in mind.
It was not necessary to depict every pipe to represent the idea of an organ 

A very large, elaborate and highly ornamented organ. (represented in typical
quick stokes and a minimal use of line, as seen throughout this Psalter)

Such an organ as this must have been what the chronicler Wulfstan of Winchester, writing in the mid 10th century, had in mind, in describing an organ that required "seventy strong men" to operate (the bellows) and two men "of concordant spirit" to operate the slides (keys); the sound of which "thunder[ed]...reverberating to such a degree that everyone stopped his gaping ears with his hands...". (A 10th century rock concert? cool!) As is typical with any medieval illustration, the artist only used the amount of visual imagery necessary to portray his intentions, utilising his personal artistic style, and did not represent an organ as we would like to see it in a photograph. The organ described by Wulfstan had ten pipes for each of forty notes on the organ, in other words 400 pipes; no medieval artist had the need or the inclination to draw so many. Given the prerogative of medieval illuminators, this illustration could actually well represent an organ as large as that described by Wulfstan, as four men could well stand for seventy. It is my belief that it can stand for one so big, one as depicted with four men, or others with any number of four or more operators, based one the representational nature of medieval art. (Oftentimes one even finds a Last Supper scene with only four or five characters, where space did not allow for the full 13.)

One of two organs depicted in the Stuttgart Psalter (also early 9th century)
The artist has also depicted a man holding a section of tubing used to convey
the air from the bellows to the organ. 

It is very interesting to compare the Utrecht Psalter and the Stuttgart Psalter for their very different ways of treating the subject matter and for the style of illustration. In the Stuttgart Psalter, the artist has included a lot more visual information, such as suggesting the structure of the platform on which the organ is built, as well as a 'shorthand' indication of acanthus leaf decoration to the top. What he has not properly observed, or did not care to accurately indicate in his drawing, is exactly how the air tube connects to the organ. and has simply shown it 'branching' out from the side of the pipes. (These organs differ from those in the Utrecht Psalter, in that they are operated by 'airbag' bellows, as opposed to ones with some sort of stationary pump.)  This does not tell us that he never saw an organ, it simply informs us that he knew enough about organs to know that there was a tube connecting the bellows to the air chamber, but he had no idea how it worked from a design standpoint, or he had no idea how to efficiently draw in an accurate manner. (and probably did not care)

The organ seems to have changed very little during the middle ages; an illustration of a 14th century organ will quickly demonstrate this fact. The main thing that changed, as with all medieval furnishings, was the style of applied ornament to the general form, which evolved with people's tastes in overall decoration as time progressed.

An early 14th century manuscript on the vices of men. This illustration is one
of  two, dealing with "gluttony", and shows a Middle Eastern court scene with a
very fat ruler and his court entertainment, including these musicians. We will
avoid the obvious political implications which do not seem to have changed
 much in 700 years, and point out that this organ is very much like the
 3rd century Aquicum example pictured above.

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