Furniture

The Elector of Saxony’s wire drawing bench is an extremely complicated piece of art and technology which is relatively unknown outside France and Germany. It deserves to be more widely known not only amongst the general public, but also art and cultural historians too due to its unique straddling of the Renaissance art and scientific world. Given the lack of Anglophone materials, I present a full and original description of its marquetry images to fill this gap in the literature and I explore aspects of their iconography using a re-emerging art historical theory called the geography of art.

To make full sense of the bench using this method, the word ‘geography’ needs to be interpreted in its broadest sense, from physical to social. In my survey, I touch on the vast areas of contemporary European religious sectarianism and the increasing awareness of a German national identity. At a local level, I take into account the seasonal courtly pastime of hunting techniques, local flora and fauna, and the importance of the resource rich natural environment around Dresden.

This seemingly disparate collection of topics is brought together by the Elector’s unique bench which ultimately reflects his Saxony. When he was within his Kunstkammer perfecting the manufacture of silver wire, he was positioning himself actively at the centre of his known, manageable, and mastered world.

Research on Global Markets has announced the addition of “Global Furniture Market to 2018 - Market Size, Top 10 Countries, Trends, and Forecasts” research report to their offering. This industry report package offers the most up-to-date market data on the actual market situation, trends, and future outlook for furniture in the world and in the top 10 global countries.

When designing a product, frequently the focus stands on function and utility issues, however searching what kind of features can promote a bigger emotional attachment to objects is an important step for a design project. With the creation of more suitable and sustainable children's furniture as an overall objective, namely a chair that can follow child's growth from 6 months up to 7 years old, we aim to produce an object for children to bond, because affection can be the most important number in this equation. This is a mix of interview-based study with quasi-experimental drawing sessions in order to illustrate children's feelings and expectations towards the Tripp Trapp® chair, which is more than 40 years in the market, designed by Peter Opsvik and produced by Stokke® - our main case study. It gives us clues to understand what the chair of their dreams would be like and what they feel sitting on an existing chair. We identified problems concerning comfort and communication with this chair, which has very large acceptance between parents worldwide but doesn't seem so appealing to children.

The generalization of the polychrome decoration in
different types of furniture during the sixteenth century
leads, in the case of chests, to a variety of decorations
with formal richness, so that they, and especially
the representations on the lids, become part of the
iconography of the domestic interiors of the period. Is
extremely interesting a group of chests with pictures,
which the Barcelona Ethnology Museum preserves an
unpublished dated example. Here this outstanding
piece is introduced and its parallels with other pieces
and pictorial productions

La generalització de l’ornamentació policroma
en les diferents tipologies de mobles durant el
segle XVI dóna lloc, en el cas de les caixes, a una
gran varietat de decoracions amb gran riquesa
formal, de tal manera que aquestes, i sobre tot les
representacions de les tapes, passen a ser part del
programa iconogràfic dels interiors domèstics del
període. Un grup summament interessant és el de
les caixes amb retrats, del qual el Museu Etnològic
de Barcelona conserva un exemplar datat inèdit.
Es dóna a conèixer aquest destacat exemplar així
com els seus paral·lelismes amb altres exemplars i
producció pictòrica."

In this paper four unpublished Neo-Sumerian records from the “craft archive” of Ur dealing with the fashioning and embellishment of different type of chairs are published. Furthermore, starting from the object issued in the texts, I have analyzed the ordeal in Neo-Sumerian sources, sedan chairs and their use in religious processions, and a rare term (gu-niĝin2) meaning, possibly, “circumference”.