The classical curule chairs were made of ivory; sometimes of solid and entire elephants' teeth, which seems to have been the typical idea of the ivory chair; sometimes the ivory was veneered on a wooden base. The foot or point of the tusk was carved into a head or beak. It is from this curved chair of state that the later chairs were derived, of which the form remained popular in Italy through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The mediæval name was _faldistorium_, rendered "faldstool," a stool or seat to support the arms when kneeling, or to act as a chair when sitting. [Illustration] The earliest type of the architectural thrones or chairs of the middle ages is the ancient chair of St. Peter, at Rome, of which a woodcut has been given in p. 35. A full description and plates of it will be found in the "Vetusta monumenta" of the Society of antiquaries for 1870. Another famous chair, that of St. Mark, is preserved at Venice, in the treasury of St. Mark's. Anciently this chair, like that of St. Peter in Rome, was covered with plates of ivory, carved panels probably fitted into frame pieces of wood as a covering to the stone. As it is now seen, however, the work is of oriental marble. It is a rudely shaped arm chair, with high back sloping upwards in the form of a pediment, truncated and surmounted by a stone, cut into an imperfect circle or oval, and having an arm or volute like the reversed angle-volute of a column projecting from the lower part of each side. The chair of St. Maximian at Ravenna dates from the sixth century; this is described in Mr. Maskell's "Ivories." A magnificent fourteenth century architectural chair of silver is preserved at Barcelona. The supports represent window tracery. One large arch supplies the front support, being cusped, and these cusps are again subdivided. The two sides form each a pair of windows of two lights or divisions, with a circle above, the whole cusped and having trefoil leaves on the cusps. The back is open tracery work, representing three narrow windows, with two lights or openings each. They finish in three lofty gables, crocketed outside and divided into tracery within. [Illustration]