Middle ages wood carving styles << Back to styles The Byzantine Wood Carving Style
of Egyptian art, Assyrian-Caldeo, but most from the Greek and Roman styles. This Byzantine style had a great influence on the Romanian carving style. The type of furniture is massive, heavy and sober, with straight lines and surfaces, using new items unlike the Greek and Roman styles, such as: semicircle high springs, short and thick cube-shaped pillars, with rounded edges at the bottom. Because this style was developed under the influence of Christian religion, the form and character of the furniture has been generally adapted to this purpose. The ornamentation of this style was one of the richest, with a pronounced abstract character and with a propagation on all objects faces and on the entire area, with very few empty places between them. The vast majority of the furniture articles were designed for humans to rest, bench required for official and religious uses. Straight legs with rectangular sections, heavy and massive, some carved with lion's foot, combined with some Byzantine designs, and the upper side of the leg having the head and chest of a lion. Byzantine ornaments was achieved through sculpture, painting and mosaics. An extremely important feature of decorative sculptures in the Byzantine style, was the small and uniform relief over the entire surface of the objects. The Islamic Wood Carving Style The furniture of this style was characterized by a weaker development of the constructive point of view, for this style a top concern was for the aspect to be rich and precious, with a very beautiful and balanced design.The type of furniture is closely related to the architectural elements used in its construction, such as springs and columns (pillars), and the design was influenced by the interiors, with an important development, used also for the furniture, with inlays of copper and ivory. Furniture used for resting are much lower, because they used carpets for sleeping. The ornamental elements were almost exclusively geometrical, such as geometric knittings, rosettes, small archways and sometimes the acanth. The Romanic Wood Carving Style This style is a mixture of Roman and Byzantine elements with some of folk origin from regions in which have been developed. Furniture being sober and massive, rigid and quite heavy, with a few decorative elements, incommode without balanced proportions, this begin to show an artistic development during the late time of the style. The technical woodworking was more as a carpenter. Massive hinges from wrought iron was used, applied with decorative nails, which is a feature of the style. Elements of this furniture style were straight and massive, inchoate finished, the assembly being done by rectangular large picks and gouges, reinforced with wrought iron, this having also a decorative role. The materials used for the Romanic style furniture construction was oak, a hard wood and moisture resistant. The ornaments of the Romanic furniture was poor at first, when some wood sculptures and iron designs were the only artistic elements for interior decoration. Later they were richer, adding: acanthus ornaments with simply made large knittings, nick points and diamond flowers with 4 or 8 petals, human and animal figures naive carved. |
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