Storage Furniture (Chest)

The principal constructional features of early medieval chests lasted until the Renaissance. The so-called Oseberg ship, dating from the Viking era (9th century ad) and discovered in 1904 in Vestfold, Norway, included among the furniture on board a chest made of oak planks secured by iron bands. The planks are not mortised together, and the end sections stand vertical, thereby forming feet, wider at the bottom than above. The lid is formed by a single curved oak plank that has been roughhewn into shape. The bottom of the chest rests in a groove cut into the end sections. The wooden construction, a primitive form of carpentry, is held together by broad iron bands, the nails are tin-plated. In this Oseberg chest, the iron mounts essential to the construction constitute the decorative element as well. Medieval chests are developments of the same principle: a piece of carpentry with decorative iron mounts, but the principle found freer application in medieval church doors than in the chests of the period.

The chest often appears in portable form as a traveller’s trunk that can also serve as a stationary piece of furniture. A number of painted, parchment-covered Florentine chests dating from the middle of the 15th century have been preserved. These were used as trunks by young girls on their way to enter a convent and later stood in their cells as pieces of storage furniture for clothes and other personal belongings. A “nun’s chest” of this type is in principle quite different from the sumptuous cassoni of the Italian Renaissance that were adorned with gilded stucco work and painted panels. Cassoni were stationary pieces of palace furniture. Specifically designed for travelling, however, were Javanese camphorwood chests that made the long voyage round the Cape of Good Hope full of stuffs and spices and eventually came to rest in an English manor house or in a gabled Dutch mansion in Amsterdam. The plank construction with metal mounts is of primitive craftsmanship. The large, smooth expanses of reddish-brown wood, with their elaborate openwork brass mounts and big, chased bolt heads to take the brunt of rough handling, have a kind of sophisticated crudeness about them. On later camphorwood chests the brass mounts are sunk flush with the surface of the wood, just as on portable writing desks and toilet cases of the French Empire period. Veneered wood was not suitable for chests intended for travel purposes, but it was possible to cover the entire chest with leather fastened with metal nails, often forming a pattern. Several beautiful, leather-covered chests made in Italy and Spain in the 17th century are known, and the form persisted in the large wardrobe trunks of succeeding centuries.