It is somewhat difficult to know to which particular city one should attribute the decorative cabinet work in which carved and inlaid ivory, with ebony or black or brown wood as a background, forms the characteristic combination. This description is well known to those who take an interest in Italian furniture.

The collector or traveller of thirty or forty years ago will remember the manufactory of Arrigoni in Milan, where so much furniture of this kind was produced, and perhaps it is not too much to assume that just as Guggenheim, Rietti and Richetti in Venice have within the last thirty or forty years reproduced the carved and gilt Venetian furniture of the two previous centuries, so in a similar way were Arrigoni and his contemporaries continuing the old traditions of the Milanese furniture designer and maker. If this supposition be correct, it is then to Milan that we may give the credit of the ebony and ivory furniture once so fashionable in Europe, but the taste for which has now almost vanished. Chairs, tables, cabinets of Renaissance form made of "ebonized" wood, and the older and better ones veneered with real ebony, had inlaid plaques of ivory engraved with figure subjects representing some of the classical battle scenes, or friezes from famous palaces or temples. When the plaques were too small for such subjects, less ambitious designs would decorate them, and other panels of ivory inlay, in which cupids and grotesques With scrolls, combined in the manner of the free Italian school, would more or less cover the plain surfaces of the pieces of furniture. Instead of inlaying the ivory, some of the richer cabinets of this description had the scrolls and figure carving in that material laid on to the ebony or ebonized wood in high relief, the subsidiary ornament being inlaid with ivory lines and scrolls. Besides the Italian reproductions of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century work of this character, the English firm of Jackson and Graham made a reputation about thirty years ago by producing this black and white furniture, perhaps less free than the originals from which they took their idea, but infinitely better constructed than the Italian work.

MILANESE COFFER INLAID WITH IVORY (CERTOSINA WORK) EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

ITALIAN CHAIRS CARVED IN WALNUT SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

A different kind of inlay called "Certosina" work was also made at Milan both in the seventeenth century and much later - brown walnut en riched by having geometrical designs of small pieces of ivory or bone let in. The word "Certo-sina" is said to be derived from the name of the religious Order, the Carthusians, and the work of this kind was executed with great skill by the monks of that Order. There are still at Pavia in the screen of the high altar at the Certosa di Pavia, excellent examples of this early work.