Our own later Jacobean or Stuart style borrowed this from the Flemish. The Flemings and the Dutch had long imported woodwork into England, and it is to that commerce that we may trace the greater likeness between the late Flemish renaissance carving and corresponding English woodwork, than between the English and the French. Dutch designs in furniture, though allied to the Flemish, were swelled out into enormous proportions. The huge wardrobe cabinets made by the Dutch of walnut wood with ebony inlaid work and waved ebony mouldings are still to be met with. The panels of the fronts are broken up into numerous angles and points. In France the fine architectural wood construction of the style of Philibert de l'Orme and so many great masters maintained itself, and a number of fine cabinets and sideboards in various collections attest the excellence of the work. The cabinet on the opposite page (n^{o.} 2573 in the Kensington museum) is of late French sixteenth century work, and combines the characteristics of the heavy furniture made in the north of Europe with a propriety of treatment in the ornamentation of mouldings and cornices peculiar to French architects, who continued to design such structures for the houses they built and fitted up. The descendants of Catherine de' Medicis and their generation were trained by Italian artists and altogether in Italian tastes, and no great change occurred in France in woodwork or furniture till the sixteenth century had closed. In German and in Italian furniture the principal changes were in the direction of veneered and marquetry work. The same vigorous quaintness continued to distinguish German decorative detail as has been already noticed. The Italians carved wood during the later sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries with extraordinary grace and vigour. The next woodcut, a pedestal in oak, shows their power in hard material: and smaller objects, such as the frames of pictures, were cut out in great sweeping leaves, perhaps of the acanthus, showing an ease and certainty in the artist that look as if he were employed upon some substance more yielding than the softest wood. Chairs were cut in the same rich style, and this luxurious carving was not unfrequently applied to the decoration of state carriages. Venice maintained a pre-eminence in this perhaps in a greater degree than Florence, though in the valley of the Arno the willow, lime, sycamore, and other soft white woods were to be had in abundance, and invited great freedom in carving. [Illustration] [Illustration]