Contemporaneous with Riesener in France was the Italian maker of marquetry, Maggiolino. In Florence, Venice, Milan, and Genoa, cabinets and commodes of marquetry were produced. German cabinet-makers manufactured the same work through the earlier part of the century. Bombé or curved furniture was also made by the Germans with great, we may almost say with extravagant, skill. To maintain mouldings on the angles of these curved and waving surfaces is a feat in workmanship of difficult attainment, and German cabinet-makers seem to have taken delight in exhibiting such skill. The quaint work of the minute carvings in box and other hard woods, admirably carried out during the times of the immediate pupils of Dürer and the school of well-trained artists who succeeded him, was no longer to be found. The desolating wars that swept over this part of Europe during the days of Louis the fourteenth and Frederick the great seem to have exhausted the country, and worn out the ancient industry of the cities. Guilds died away, the men who composed them being required for the exigencies of war, and the wealth of the inhabitants was so reduced that the leisure to enjoy and even the means to buy fine productions of art existed no longer. Few collectors have done greater service to the study of English art than Horace Walpole; and few have had the opportunities he enjoyed a century ago, when he was able to fill Strawberry Hill with a collection of mediæval, renaissance, and later works of art of every description. A lively passage, alluding to the contract for the roof and the glazing of King's college chapel, Cambridge, commemorates his value for these art traditions. "As much," he says, "as we imagine ourselves arrived at higher perfection in the arts, it would not be easy for a master of a college to go into St. Margaret's parish, Southwark, to _bespeak_ such a roof as that of King's college, and a dozen or two of windows so admirably drawn, and order them to be sent home by such a day, as if they were bespeaking a chequered pavement."