Italian

Italy unified late, and its furniture never became national. What exists is a set of regional traditions with long memories: Venice and its glass, Sicily and its Baroque, Florence and its carving, Turin and its court. A piece is usually identified by city before it is identified by period, and the city is often the more useful information.

The other constant is the Church. Italy kept a continuous demand for liturgical furniture, vestments, silver and carved figures while the rest of Europe moved through secular fashions, and that continuity is why Italian craft skills survived in unbroken workshops. It also means a great deal of Italian work is ecclesiastical rather than domestic, and should be read that way.

The aesthetic favours colour and material over restraint: majolica, polychrome marble, gilt wood, and glass that is coloured inside rather than painted on. Where northern Europe edited, Italy decorated — and did it with a technical confidence that came from guilds that had never stopped working.

The postwar answer is the opposite of all three, and it is Italy's second contribution to world design. Milan turned craft into industry — furniture houses, lighting, appliances — and then, in the 1970s, a generation turned against that industry entirely. Radical design and Studio Alchimia argued for decoration and quotation again, and Memphis made the same argument in laminate and clashing colour. It is the point where Italian design stops being about materials and becomes about ideas, and the reason the country produced both the most restrained and the least restrained objects in this museum.

The Baroque (17th–18th century) is the most Italian of the periods: Sicilian excess, Venetian glass, and carved giltwood at a scale that assumes a church or a palazzo.

Stile Liberty (1890–1910) is the Italian Art Nouveau — decorative, floral, and less structural than the German version.

The twentieth century is Murano and the factories: glass technique as the national art, and mid-century ceramics that carry it forward.

Postmodern Milan (1976–1992) is Alchimia and Memphis — small-run, theoretical, and made to be argued about rather than lived with.