1. A complete bibliography of Forman’s published writings can be found in New England Furniture: Essays in Memory of Benno M. Forman, edited by Brock W. Jobe (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1987), pp. xv–xvi. Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730: An Interpretive Catalogue, edited by Robert F. Trent and Robert Blair St. George (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), pp. 8, xxiv.

2. Benno M. Forman, “Delaware Valley ‘Crookt Foot’ and Slat-Back Chairs: The Fussell-Savery Connection,” Winterthur Portfolio 15, no. 1 (spring 1980): 41–64, at 49; Albert Sack, The New Fine Points of Furniture, Early American: Good, Better, Best, Superior, Masterpiece (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993).

3. Joseph Manca, “A Matter of Style: The Question of Mannerism in Seventeenth-Century American Furniture,” Winterthur Portfolio 38, no. 1 (2003): 1–36, at 1, 5, 8.

4. Calcagnini cited in John Shearman, Mannerism (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 156; Sebastiano Serlio, Extraordinario libro di architettura (1551), pl. 28; Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, translated by Joseph J. S. Peake (1924; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 73, 79. Manca, “A Matter of Style,” p. 34.

5. Robert F. Trent, “The Concept of Mannerism” and “New England Joinery and Turning before 1700,” in New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, edited by Jonathan Fairbanks and Robert Trent, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 3: 368–412, 501–10. Manca, “A Matter of Style,” p. 23.

6. Trent, “The Concept of Mannerism,” p. 376. For a detailed account of English borrowings from Serlio, Dietterlin, Vredeman, and de l’Orme, see Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558–1625 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 15–18, 27–30, 38–40, 58–88. Wells-Cole shows that of these figures, Serlio and Vredeman were the most significant. By comparison, the direct influence of Dietterlin and de l’Orme was negligible. Timothy Mowl, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style (London: Phaidon Press, 1993), p. 164; see also Benno M. Forman, “Continental Furniture Craftsmen in London,” Furniture History 7 (1971): 94–120; Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), chap. 13, passim. Shakespeare’s lines are as follows: “Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst and brief; / it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and fun / of invention: taunt him with the licence of ink: / if thou thou’st him some thrice, it shall not be / amiss; and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of / paper, although the sheet were big enough for the / bed of Ware in England, set ’em down: go, about it.” Twelfth Night (ca. 1601), act 3, scene 2.

7. Thomas Dekker, in a separately published text on the entry festivities, noted that the work crew for the entertainment included eighty joiners, sixty carpenters, six turners, and other artificers, “over whom Stephen Harrison Joyner was appointed chiefe; who was the sole Inventor of the Architecture, and from whome all directions, for so much as belonged to Carving, Joyning, Molding, and all other worke in those five Pageants of the Citie (Paynting excepted) were set downe.” Dekker further described “The magnificent entertainment given to King Iames, Queene Anne his wife, and Henry Frederick the Prince, uppon the day of his Maiesties tryumphant passage (from the Tower) through his honourable cittie (and chamber) of London, being the 15. of March. 1603, As well by the English as by the strangers: with the speeches and songs, delivered in the severall pageants.” Other civic pageants included the annual lord mayor’s inauguration in London and processionals used to entertain royalty on their progresses around England. See Jacobean Civic Pageants, edited by Richard Dutton (Staffordshire, Eng.: Keele University Press, 1995); Dutton identifies John Grinkin as another artificer who contributed to such pageants, pp. 10, 141. Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw, Architecture without Kings: The Rise of Puritan Classicism under Cromwell (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 79. John Peacock, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 62–63. See also David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 95–102. David M. Bergeron, “Pageants, Masques, and Scholarly Ideology,” in Practicing Renaissance Scholarship: Plays, Pageants, Patrons, and Politics (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Dusquesne University Press, 2000), pp. 164–92, passim, p. 181. Many of the terms Bergeron mentions first appear in English in John Shute’s The First and Chief Grounds of Architecture (London, 1563). Anthony Wells-Cole points to the oak and plaster hall screen at Burton Agnes, Yorkshire, as “the nearest surviving visual equivalent” of Harrison’s monuments. Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, p. 173. Design and the Decorative Arts: Britain, 1500–1900, edited by Michael Snodin and John Styles (London: V&A Publications, 2001), p. 84.

8. Manca, “A Matter of Style,” p. 27; Horace Field and Michael Bunney, English Domestic Architecture of the XVII and XVIII Centuries (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1928), p. 15. Mark Girouard, who describes Smythson’s architecture as “Elizabethan” rather than mannerist in style, vigorously objects to understanding the period in terms of mistranslation: “Elizabethan architecture at its best is not an undigested mixture, but a true synthesis, a style in its own right.” Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 162. Manca points to Malcolm Airs, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History (Bridgend, Eng.: Bramley Books, 1998), as upholding a view of English architecture as a case of ineptitude rather than conscious manipulation of classical norms. David Evett also sees artisans as slowing and modifying the influx of new ideas, a process he refers to as “crafts inertia.” Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England, p. 11. Manca, seeking to undercut prevailing uses of the concept of mannerism, suggests that Summerson himself had regrets about the choice of the term “artisan mannerism” by the time of his classic work’s 1983 edition, but to me this seems unlikely given his continued use of the phrase. Manca, “A Matter of Style,” p. 28 n. 33; John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830, (1953; rev. ed, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 144V. In any case, Summerson’s locution has proved sufficiently useful to win wide currency among historians of British art and architecture, notably Elizabeth Chew, Timothy Mowl, Caroline Van Eck, and Lucy Worsley. Wendell Garrett also adopted the phrase in “The Matter of Consumer’s Taste,” Winterthur Newsletter 15, no. 3 (March–April 1969); see also William N. Hosley, “Regional Furniture/Regional Life,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1995), pp. 3–38, 35 n. 12.

9. Manca, “A Matter of Style,” p. 27. Henri Zerner is not a recent convert to the limited view of mannerism; already in 1972 he argued against the prevailing scholarly habit, inspired by Shearman’s Mannerism of using the term to unite disparate media within an overarching “style of civilization.” Zerner, “Observations on the Use of the Concept of Mannerism,” in The Meaning of Mannerism, edited by Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols Jr. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1972), pp. 105–19, at 109. For a detailed account of Shearman’s position and Zerner’s critique, see Elizabeth Cropper, introduction to Craig Hugh Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera (Vienna: Bibliotheca Artibus et Historiae, IRSA Verlag, 1992). Alice T. Friedman, “Did England Have a Renaissance? Classical and Anticlassical Themes in Elizabethan Culture,” in Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, edited by Susan J. Barnes and Walter S. Melion (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, 1989), pp. 95–111, 110 n. 3. For a wide-ranging application of the concept of mannerism to other decorative arts of the period, see J. F. Hayward, Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism (London: Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 1976); and Alain Gruber, The History of Decorative Arts: The Renaissance and Mannerism in Europe (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993).

10. Jonathan Prown and Richard Miller address the “only marginally rococo” style of Philadelphia furniture in “The Rococo, the Grotto, and the Philadelphia High Chest,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996), pp. 105–36. For more on the inadequacy of stylistic terms to describe decorative arts in the eighteenth century, see Rémy G. Saisselin, The Enlightenment against the Baroque: Economics and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 3. Manca’s concept of grammatical correctness might be further complicated by applying the work of art historian Christy Anderson, who has written a compelling analysis of Inigo Jones’s classicism as a conscious effort to transform the “language” of architecture, comparable to contemporary efforts to regulate the English language itself. “Within the circle of the court,” Anderson argues, “Jones’s architecture was equated with the literate and the Latinate, whereas Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture was equivalent to the vernacular use of English.” Christy Anderson, “Monstrous Babels: Language and Architectural Style in the English Renaissance,” in Architecture and Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture, c. 1000–1650, edited by George Clarke and Paul Crossley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 148–61, at 153. The relationship between these two competing languages—one learned but static, the other native and inventive, but parochial—is analyzed from several perspectives in Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1650, edited by Lucy Gent (New Haven, Conn.: Paul Mellon Center Publications, 1995). See also Peter Erickson’s review of Albion’s Classicism in Art Bulletin 78, no. 4 (December 1996): 736–39. Erickson comments that the pressing question of method in appraising the English Renaissance is whether classicism and “Albion” (i.e., indigenous British) traditions are to be seen in “sharp contrast” or as a “hybrid mixture.”

11. Manca, “A Matter of Style,” pp. 27–28. Manca also implies that Anthony Wells-Cole eschews the term “mannerism” in his recent Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, which is not the case; see, for example, pp. 58, 170. Benno M. Forman, “Axioms for Furniture Historians,” Benno M. Forman Papers, box 1, Winterthur Library.

12. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 4 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 2: 355–56. Zuccari was in England in the mid-1570s and painted several portraits there; he is quoted in Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art from Plato to Winckelmann (New York: New York University Press, 1985), p. 298. See also E. James Mundy, with the assistance of Elizabeth Ourusoff de Fernandez-Gimenez, Renaissance into Baroque: Italian Master Drawings by the Zuccari, 1550–1600 (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Center, 1989); and Panofsky, Idea, pp. 75ff.

13. Benno M. Forman, “Axioms for Furniture Historians.” Shearman, Mannerism, p. 19.

14. Robert F. Trent, Hearts and Crowns: Folk Chairs of the Connecticut Coast, 1720–1840 (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1977), p. 11. For a similar analysis of composition in turned chairs, see Robert F. Trent and Karin Goldstein, “Notes about New ‘Tinkham’ Chairs,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1998), pp. 215–37.

15. Trent, “New England Joinery and Turning before 1700,” pp. 504, 505. Manca, “A Matter of Style,” p. 36.

16. Forman, “Axioms for Furniture Historians.”

17. As You Like It, act 2, scene 7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), pt. 1, chap. 16. As Manca points out, Shakespeare himself has in the past been called a mannerist author, notably in John Greenwood, Shifting Perspectives and the Stylish Style: Mannerism in Shakespeare and His Jacobean Contemporaries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), though this attempt to circumscribe the playwright within a stylistic category has met with some skepticism. For an important early summation of mannerism as a term in literary history, see James V. Mirollo, “The Mannered and the Mannerist in Late Renaissance Literature,” in Robinson and Nichols, The Meaning of Mannerism, pp. 7–24.

18. Christopher Gilbert, “Oak Furniture from Yorkshire Churches,” in Christopher Gilbert, Selected Writings on Vernacular Furniture, 1966–1998 (Leeds, Eng.: Regional Furniture Society, 2001), p. 9. Victor Chinnery, Oak Furniture: The British Tradition (Suffolk, Eng.: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1979), pp. 223, 305.

19. Hilary Ballon, “Constructions of the Bourbon State: Classical Architecture in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, pp. 135–48, at 136. Although de l’Orme’s treatise is known to have been present in England—Thomas Tresham, Francis Willoughby, and Henry Wotton all owned copies—Anthony Wells-Cole notes that direct borrowings from his work are rare among surviving buildings. Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, p. 38. The French order appears with great frequency in mannerist objects from the Netherlands, so the route of transmission was likely through objects rather than print.

20. John Dee, introduction to Euclid’s Elements (London, 1570; translated by Henry Billingsley), quoted in Lily Campbell, Scenes and Machines on the English Stage during the Renaissance: A Classical Revival (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1921), p. 80.

21. On Serlio’s reception in England, see Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, translated by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. xxxiii–xxxiv; and Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, pp. 15–18. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises; or the Doctrine of Handyworks (London, 1678; reprint, Mendham, N.J.: Astragal Press, 1994). For du Brueil, see Simon Jervis, Printed Furniture Designs before 1650 (Leeds, Eng.: Furniture History Society, 1974). For a discussion of seventeenth-century New England paintings, see Jonathan L. Fairbanks, “Portrait Painting in Seventeenth-Century Boston: Its History, Methods, and Materials,” in New England Begins, pp. 413–55.

22. Peacock, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones, p. 58.

23. Sebastiano Serlio, The Book of Architecture, translated by Robert Peake (London, 1611). On the office of revels, see Campbell, Scenes and Machines, pp. 104–5; the quoted passage was originally transcribed in A. Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Elizabeth (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1908), p. 5. Busino is quoted in Allardyce Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1938), p. 33. On musical instrument makers and geometric theory, see Stephen Birkett and William Jurgenson, “Why Didn’t Historical Makers Need Drawings? Part I: Practical Geometry and Proportion,” Galpin Society Journal, no. 54 (May 2001): 242–84.

24. Jerzy Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 59–60. Albions Trivmph: Personated in a Maske at Court (London, 1631). As is typical of Jones’s work, the allegorical figures of Architecture are drawn from Continental pattern books; identical representations of Theory and Practice appear, for example, in the frontispiece to Vredeman de Vries’s Architectura (Antwerp, 1577).

25. The literature on early American cupboards includes Robert F. Trent, Peter Follansbee, and Alan Miller, “First Flowers of the Wilderness: Mannerist Furniture from a Northern Essex County, Massachusetts, Shop,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2001), pp. 1–64; Robert F. Trent and Michael Podmaniczky, “An Early Cupboard Fragment from the Harvard College Joinery Tradition,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 2002), pp. 228–42; Patricia E. Kane, Furniture of the New Haven Colony: The Seventeenth-Century Style (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1973); Gerald W. R. Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1988), pp. 128, 383–87; Gerald W. R. Ward, “Some Thoughts on Connecticut Cupboards and Other Case Furniture,” in New England Furniture: Essays in Memory of Benno M. Forman, pp. 66–87; Trent, “New England Joinery and Turning before 1700,” pp. 530–32; and Pilgrim Century Furniture: An Historical Survey, edited by Robert F. Trent (New York: Main Street/Universe Books, 1976), pp. 55–78, 89–94, 122–25. Jonathan Prown has made a similar argument regarding the eighteenth-century desk-and-bookcase form, writing that their interiors “serve as personal theaters where users played out the dramatic affairs of business and everyday life. . . . Projecting into the foreground and serving as the main point of interaction, the leather-covered writing surface is a stage that is defined on its outer perimeter by a wooden frame.” Jonathan Prown and Ronald L. Hurst, Southern Furniture, 1680–1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1997), p. 445. Shakespeare writes in scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet (1592): “Away with the joint-stools; remove the courtcubbord, look to the plate.” Benno M. Forman, “Cupboards,” Benno M. Forman Papers, box 16, Winterthur Library. Ralph Edwards advanced the idea that “court” might be from the French in The Shorter Dictionary of English Furniture from the Middle Ages to the Late Georgian Period (Covent Garden, Eng.: Country Life, 1964), pp. 288–89. Peter Thornton, who initially concurred with this etymology, later revoked the argument in “Two Problems,” Furniture History 7 (1971): 64; Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 233, 380 n. 37.

26. The Royal Works document is located in the United Kingdom National Archives, Public Record Office, London (e351/3216) and is quoted in John Orrell, The Human Stage: English Theatre Design, 1657–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 39–41; Mark A. Meadow, Hof-, Staats- en Stadsceremonies/Court, State and City Ceremonies (Zwolle, Netherlands: Uitgeverij Waanders, 1998); George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 96; La siège et les fêtes de Binche, edited by Charles Reulens (Mons, 1878), pp. 116–19; Albert van de Put, “Two Drawings of the Fetes at Binche for Charles V and Philip (II), 1549,” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3, nos. 1–2 (April 1939–July 1940): 49–55.

27. Orrell, The Human Stage, p. 209. Mary Ann Caws, The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 59.

28. Sally M. Promey, “Seeing the Self ‘in Frame’: Early New England Material Practice and Puritan Piety,” Material Religion 1, no. 1 (March 2005): 10–47. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965). See also Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Martin Holbrook, “Courtly Negotiations,” in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jennifer Chibnall, “‘To That Secure Fix’d State’: The Function of the Caroline Masque Form,” in The Court Masque, edited by David Lindley (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 81. Samuel J. Edgerton, “Maniera and the Mannaia: Decorum and Decapitation in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Meaning of Mannerism, pp. 67–103, at 67. Frank Kermode, The Age of Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 190.

29. Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origins of Modern Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 279. Manca, “A Matter of Style,” pp. 23–24. On the Ipswich chair and its mate, see Trent, New England Begins, pp. 514–16; Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 135–36.

30. As You Like It, act 3, scene 2. Benno M. Forman, “A Catalogue of Ware Chairs,” unpublished typescript, 1973, p. 21, Benno M. Forman Papers, box 11, Winterthur Library. Forman, American Seating Furniture, p. xxiv.