History and Origins: Emergence and Evolution of the Form

History and Origins: Emergence and Evolution of the Form

HIstorical Context

Cabinets and writing desks appear, differentiated by the peculiarities in taste and materials prevalent in their places of origin, throughout the furniture of Renaissance and Baroque Europe, fulfilling a spectrum of purposes from practical to decorative and increasingly demonstrating collaboration and exchange. Spain, whose period of domination following the Reconquista produced a golden age of arts and literature centered at the Philip II’s royal monastery at el Escorial, developed a thoroughly individual form of cabinet called the vargueño (preferred in English) or bargueño (preferred in Spanish), a subset of the more general escritorio (writing desk) characterized by a fall-front writing surface, elaborate iron locks and assorted inlays, and walnut trestle stands called pies de Puente (bridge feet) with turned legs and iron supports.
Although less finely crafted than many analogous objects originating in places such as France and Flanders, the bargueño became a fixture of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish interior, appearing as such in varying levels of opulence and subject to evolving trends in fashion. The exact origins of the bargueño are not entirely certain, and in fact the term is now believed to derive from a set of historically erroneous beliefs that either the cabinets were most extensively made in the small Toledan town of Bargas or else that a certain cabinetmaker named Vargas developed them (b and v are often sounded equivalently in castellano, resulting in ambiguities among the historical spellings of these names). Many early bargueños do, however, evidence a strong decorative influence from the tessellated, geometric sensibilities of Moorish art and architecture; although the Catholic Monarchs had officially expelled the Moors from Spain after taking Boabdil’s last stronghold at la Alhama, many stayed and either converted or professed to convert (mudéjar vs. morisco). Later, the plateresque style—a silver repoussé technique meaning “in the way of the silversmith”—emerged in architecture and was echoed in furniture, blending the mudéjar style with gothic elements.
Although Spain began a gradual decline from power during the reign of Philip II, and its artistic golden age consequently came to an end in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Spanish royalty was responsible for commissioning some of the most opulent examples of European furniture around the turn of the seventeenth century, due in part to the extent of its viceregal territories. Having taken control of Portugal in 1580, Spain suddenly found itself in possession of ports into which enormous quantities of ebony and ivory were being imported, and these prized materials quickly became the standard among the most expensive furniture favored in the Aragonese courts. The simple black and white color schemes of the resulting objects paralleled the interiors in which they were housed as well as the simple tones of dress favored at the time; their engraved ebony panels likewise often extolled the Spanish royalty, capturing great historical triumphs, territorial maps, and later even vignettes from Don Quijote.
Yet the finest of these cabinets were not, in fact, produced in Spain but rather were the collaborative products of artists working in Naples, one of Spain’s viceregal territories in which a tradition of incredibly extravagant gift giving emerged in linking the region to the Spanish royalty.