Of the early Italian furniture of the mediæval period there is at South Kensington one fine specimen, a coffer of cypress, covered with flat surface imagery filled in with coloured wax composition. It dates from the fourteenth century. The better known Italian furniture of the quattrocento or "fourteen hundred period," _i.e._ the fifteenth century, is gilt and painted. The richness of this old work is owing to the careful preparation of the ground or bed on which the gold is laid and the way in which the preparation was modelled with the tool. The old gold is, besides, both thicker and purer, more malleable, and less liable to suffer from the action of the atmosphere than the gold we now use for this purpose. The paintings executed on such pieces of furniture as offered suitable surfaces to the artist, boxes and coffers (and, for church uses, reliquaries), are equal to the finest works of that kind and of the same period. Many artists worked in this way. Dello Delli was the best known in regard to such productions. His work became so entirely the fashion that, according to Vasari, no house was complete without a specimen of it. Andrea di Cosimo was another. It need not be said that such men and their contemporaries had a number of pupils similarly employed. Every piece of painted furniture attributed to Dello Delli cannot be warranted. There are, however, specimens which we believe to be from his hand in the Kensington collection, and numbers of fronts and panels and fragments of great merit which illustrate his style. Besides this kind of decoration, the Venetians had derived from Persia and India another beautiful system of surface ornament; marquetry, a fine inlay of ivory, metal, and woods, stained to vary the colour. The work is in geometric patterns only. It is found on the ivory boxes and other objects sculptured in that material, and attributed to Italian as well as to Byzantine sources. In the fifteenth century Florence also came prominently to the front in the manufacture of these and other rich materials; as well as of ivory inlaid into solid cypress wood and walnut, known as Certosina work. The style is Indian in character, and consists in geometric arrangements of stars made of diamond-shaped pieces: varied with conventional flowers in pots, &c. The name Certosina is derived from the great Certosa, charterhouse, or Carthusian monastery between Milan and Pavia: where this kind of decoration is employed in the choir fittings of the splendid church of that monastery.