Cabinet (room)

A cabinet (also known by other terms) was a private room in the houses and palaces of early modern Europe serving as a study or retreat, usually for a man. The cabinet would be furnished with books and works of art, and sited adjacent to his bedchamber, the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance studiolo. In the Late Medieval period, such newly perceived requirements for privacy had been served by the solar of the English gentry house, and a similar, less secular purpose had been served by a private oratory. A cabinet (also known by other terms) was a private room in the houses and palaces of early modern Europe serving as a study or retreat, usually for a man. The cabinet would be furnished with books and works of art, and sited adjacent to his bedchamber, the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance studiolo. In the Late Medieval period, such newly perceived requirements for privacy had been served by the solar of the English gentry house, and a similar, less secular purpose had been served by a private oratory. Such a room might be used as a study or office, or just a sitting room. Heating the main rooms in large palaces or mansions in the winter was difficult, and small rooms were more comfortable. They also offered more privacy from servants, other household members, and visitors. Typically such a room would be for the use of a single individual, so that a house might have at least two (his and hers) and often more. Names varied: cabinet, closet, study (from the Italian studiolo), office, and a range of more specifically female equivalents, such as a boudoir. With its origins in requirements for increased privacy for reading and meditation engendered by the humanist avocation of many of the Italian noble and mercantile elite in the Quattrocento, the studiolo provided a retreat often reachable only through the, comparatively public, bedroom. This was true for the elaborate Studiolo of Francesco I de' Medici located in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. The standard fittings of the late medieval and early modern study can be inventoried among the conventional trappings in portrayals of Saint Jerome in illuminated manuscripts, in paintings, or in engravings like those of Albrecht Dürer (illustration): a chair; perhaps a footstool to lift the feet from the draughty floor; a portable desk with a slanted surface for writing; and a table, bearing a book-rest, perhaps with a weighted ribbon to hold a book open at a place, and a candlestick (to supplement the light from the window, which is often shuttered but also which often has a window seat in the depth of the wall). In Domenico Ghirlandaio's Saint Jerome in his Study, shelving runs around the room at the level of the frieze, on it are curious objects, containers of various types, and large volumes lying on their sides. Studioli entirely inlaid in intarsia for the ducal palaces of Urbino (in situ) and Gubbio (remounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) with simulated shelves and built-in cabinets filled with books, scientific instruments and examples of geometric solids, all rendered in striking trompe-l'oeil evoke the character of the pursuits of the cabinet. For Ferdinando Gonzaga's studiolo at Mantua, in about 1619, Domenico Fetti painted a series of New Testament parables, suitable for private contemplation; they proved very popular, and Fetti and his studio, and Fetti's imitators, repeated them for other similar retreats. Isabella d'Este called her room with paintings commissioned from Andrea Mantegna, Perugino and others a studiolo. A studiolo would often have a Latin motto painted or inlaid round the frieze. Heraldry and personal devices and emblems would remind the occupant of his station in life. Series of portraits of exemplary figures were popular, whether the Nine Worthies or the classical philosophers, in imaginary ideal portrait heads. Perhaps the grandest studiolo was the Camerino ('little room') of Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara, for which the greatest painters of the day were commissioned from about 1512-1525 to paint mythological canvases, very large by the standards of the time. Fra Bartolommeo died before starting work, and Raphael got no further than a drawing, but Giovanni Bellini completed The Feast of the Gods (NGA, Washington) in 1514. Titian was then brought in and added three of his finest works: Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London), The Andrians and The Worship of Venus (both Prado, Madrid), as well as repainting the background of the Bellini to match his own works better. Dosso Dossi, Alphonso's court painter, completed the room with a large painting (now lost) and ten small oblong subjects to go as a frieze above the others. In Elizabethan England, such a private retreat would most likely be termed a closet, the most recent in a series of developments in which people of means found ways to withdraw by degrees from the public life of the household as it was lived in the late medieval great hall. This sense of 'closet' has continued use in the term 'closet drama', which is a literary work in the form of theatre, intended not to be mounted nor publicly presented, but to be read and visualised in privacy. Two people in intimate private conversation were until recently said to be 'closetted'. In his closet at Christ Church, Oxford, Robert Burton wrote The Anatomie of Melancholy (1621). Cabinet in English was often used for strongrooms, or treasure-stores - the tiny but exquisite Elizabethan tower strongroom at Lacock Abbey might have been so called - but also in the wider sense. David Rizzio was murdered when dining with his putative lover Mary, Queen of Scots in 'a cabinet abowte xii footes square, in the same a little low reposinge bedde, and a table'.