Renaissance Style

The Renaissance style is the artistic movement that characterizes the 15th and 16th centuries. In this period we witness a radical change in human thought which marks the end of the Middle Ages. The man who until then had lived in the fear of God and expressed his faith in art , rediscovers his centrality and role in the world, which is expressed through art. In the Renaissance style the figures abandon the classical rigidity and become more vital. Even the environments are represented with greater realism and the Christian story is narrated from a more human and less idealized point of view.

The first Renaissance works appeared in Italy and belong to Giotto and Masaccio , other great exponents are Leonardo , Michelangelo and Raphael . From Italy the Renaissance style spread to Germany and Flanders, with different characteristics from those across the Alps: Italian artists concentrated on the study of perspective and the representation of space, European ones focused on the detailed representation of the outside world.

Renaissance style furniture

The Renaissance-style antique furniture takes on architectural forms, perfect proportions, adorned with rationally arranged decorations, taken from Greco-Roman iconography. Supports and feet carved with acanthus leaves or lion's paws appear at least as early as the early 1560s. Next to parallelepiped chests appear others in the shape of a classic sarcophagus, with surfaces marked by ornamental metrics rigidly disciplined within pilasters and frames. The novelty of the sculptural intaglio decoration deduced from archaeological remains triumphs, stylistic features decoded and reworked in different compositional harmonies arranged in alternating plays of dentils, ovules, volutes, scrolls of acanthus, loricature, curbing, candelabra and grotesques, and the whole relives pantheon of pagan mythology, to historize in particular cassoni, which from the initial function of container of the wedding dowry takes over the new instance of real parade furniture. It should be remembered that the furniture displayed was generally richly embellished with gold leaf gilding. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, the use of the Carthusian inlay definitively declined, although even in the Renaissance this technique had great renown, just think of the activity of the Tasso workshop in Florence.

Finding Renaissance style furniture is not difficult but only a few can guarantee their originality. One of these is Di Mano in Mano which has been operating in this sector for over 20 years and, for this reason, can offer you maximum professionalism and attention to your needs. Every day we update our online catalog to be able to offer you the largest number of unique and original pieces.

To find out more about this style, we offer you in-depth articles written by our industry experts:

- Between Baroque and Renaissance