Within the past twenty years or so the modern reproductions of Italian furniture have shown a great deterioration from those made in Venice, Milan and Florence previously. Every critical visitor to an Earl's Court exhibition must have been struck by the quantity of ill-constructed, over-carved, and flimsy work sent over to minister to the taste for cheap display which unfortunately so many Englishmen are inclined to indulge in, and the result has been to bring Italian furniture into disrepute. The so-called "walnut" is often only stained white wood, and the cabinet work, never in the best days equal to the ornamental exteriors, has become worse and worse, until the reproduction is but a parody of the old Renaissance design it is supposed to represent, when the lines of a cassone showed the intention of the artist's mind, and the details of the carved enrichment were the expression of the carver's fancy, dignified and restrained by the canons of cultivated taste.

In the present year's Italian Exhibition at Earl's Court (1904), one is pleased to find a few exceptions to this over-carved woodwork, and some of the reproductions of Italian Renaissance designs sent over by San Giorgio of Rome, both of polychromatic and also of gilded furniture, are much more satisfactory. The ornament in relief by means of "gesso" work is quite on the original lines, and some of the painted decoration, when not too ambitious, is in good taste.

The enormous difference between the fine old sixteenth-century work and these quite modern productions should be so palpable that comment seems unnecessary; the artist's proof engraving and the cheapest of popular prints from the same plate, seem to me to be a somewhat appropriate simile, but if we continue the comparison of the different "states" of an engraving with the various classes of reproductions of Italian furniture, one may mention that the older furniture, made from fifty to a hundred years ago, worn and toned by age and rubbing, is perhaps more like some of those excellent impressions from the plate which follow the artist's proofs. These are apt to be taken by even an expert for the original pieces of Renaissance work. Naturally they vary in degrees of excellence, and one can only be guided by the vigour and expression of the carved work; by the appearance of the wood itself; when either entirely gilt or picked out with gilding, by noticing the care with which the work has been done. There are really no absolute tests to decide the age of a cassone, a table or a chair of the kind of work discussed in this chapter, but by applying some of the cautions which have been given under the remarks on " faked" furniture, and by bearing in mind that old Renaissance woodwork has been made nearly four hundred years, and therefore is extremely rare and difficult to find in anything like a complete state, the reader may be helped to distinguish between an original and a bad copy; that old and good copies will not occasionally find their way into the best collections is outside the limits of reasonable expectation.