Solid and expensive furniture continued to be used in Spain throughout the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries; the ponderous chest, the ponderous brasier, ponderous stools, ponderous armchairs with massive nails and coverings of velvet or of decorated leather (Plates v., vi., and vii.). Upon the wall, the tapestry of earlier times was often replaced by paintings of a sacred character, or family portraits. The comedy titled _La Garduña de Sevilla_, written about the middle of the seventeenth century by Alonso del Castillo Solorzano, describes the interior of a rich man's dwelling of this period. "Upstairs Rufina noted delicate summer hangings, new chairs of Moscovy cowhide, curiously carved buffets, and ebony and ivory writing-desks; for Marquina, though a skinflint towards others, was generous in the decoration of his own abode.... When dinner was over, he took her to a room embellished with fine paintings, and with a bed whose canopy was of some Indian fabric.... Paintings by famous masters were plentifully hung about the house, together with fine Italian hangings, various kinds of writing-desks, and costly beds and canopies. When they had visited nearly all the rooms, they opened the door of one which contained a beautiful altar and its oratory. Here were a great array of costly and elaborate Roman vessels, agnuses of silver and of wood, and flowers arranged in various ways. This chamber, too, was full of books distributed in gilded cases." [Illustration: VIII THE _SALA DE LA BARCA_ (_Before the fire of 1890. Alhambra, Granada_)] A characteristic piece of Spanish furniture was at this time the solid-looking cabinet known as the _vargueño_, so denominated from the little town of Vargas, near Toledo, formerly a well-known centre of their manufacture. These cabinets, whose origin, according to the Marquis of Monistrol, may be traced to a fifteenth-century form of _huche_, or chest provided with drawers for guarding articles of value, and which opened in the centre, are commonly made of walnut. The front lets down upon a massive wooden rest supported by the legs, and forms a folding writing-table containing at the back a number of drawers or compartments for storing documents, or other things of minor bulk. The woodwork of these cabinets is often without carving; but generally in such cases their bareness is relieved by massive and elaborately ornamented iron fastenings and a decorative key.