"[A]
[A] Walter Pater: "Studies in the Renaissance."
It is to this unity of the arts we owe the fact that the art of
beautifying the home took its proper place. During the Middle Ages the
Church had absorbed the greater part of the best man had to give, and
home life was rather a hit or miss affair, the house was a fortress, the
family possessions so few that they could be packed into chests and
easily moved. During the Renaissance the home ideal grew, and, although
the Church still claimed the best, home life began to have comforts and
beauties never dreamed of before. The walls glowed with color,
tapestries and velvets added their beauties, and the noble proportions
of the marble halls made a rich background for the elaborately carved
furniture.
The doors of Italian palaces were usually inlaid with woods of light
shade, and the soft, golden tone given by the process was in beautiful,
but not too strong, contrast with the marble architrave of the doorway,
which in the fifteenth century was carved in low relief combined with
disks of colored marble, sliced, by the way, from Roman temple pillars.
Later as the classic taste became stronger the carving gave place to a
plain architrave and the over-door took the form of a pediment.
Mantels were of marble, large, beautifully carved, with the fireplace
sunk into the thickness of the wall. The overmantel usually had a carved
panel, but later, during the sixteenth century, this was sometimes
replaced by a picture.
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