New York neoclassical furniture. (Current and Coming).

The civilizations of ancient Rome and Greece have long been venerated by the cultures that followed, including the humanists of the Renaissance and the founding fathers of the United States. When eighteenth-century archeologists discovered ancient sites in Italy there was a renewed interest in the architecture and decorative arts of the classical past. In furniture, one of the venerable forms found in ancient Rome was the sella curulis (seat of honor)--a type of folding stool reserved for political authorities known as the magistrates curulis, and the depiction of these stools on ancient coins is incontrovertible evidence that every citizen would have understood their meaning.

The evolution of the curule from its beginnings to the early nineteenth century is the subject of an exhibition organized by David L. Barquist and Ethan W. Lasser who also collaborated on the accompanying publication. This small, tightly focused show, entitled Curule: Ancient Design in American Federal Furniture, is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, from August 5 to January 4, 2004. It includes furniture, works on paper, books, and ancient coins.

In classical times the base of the curule was composed of two intersecting S-shaped legs attached fore and aft to the sides of the stool. During the Middle Ages the form reemerged, but the legs were placed along the front and along the back of the stool. The symbolic meaning of the fonn to the ancients was not fully understood until the Renaissance, when chairmakers continued to fashion curule chairs and stools with the legs along the front and back. During the neoclassical period, from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the form was resurrected again and widely illustrated in publications about ancient sites and in furniture design books, ...