Evolution of Interiors I

The earliest interiors we can reconstruct — Egyptian furniture (animal-leg chairs, stools, chests, headrests) preserved by a funerary culture, in ebony, ivory and gilding; Mesopotamia and the reclining banquet; the Indus Valley / Harappan courtyard house with its standardised brick and drainage (furniture inferred, not survived); Greek interiors — the megaron, the andron and symposium, the klinē couch and the klismos chair; and the Roman domus and insula — atrium, peristyle, triclinium and cubiculum, the Four Pompeian wall-painting styles, mosaic and the hypocaust.

Byzantine interiors of glass mosaic on a gold ground and marble revetment (Hagia Sophia, Ravenna) that dissolve the wall into light; the medieval Great Hall — central hearth, dais, trestle tables, benches and the chest as primary furniture, tapestries for warmth and status; Romanesque to Gothic, where the pointed arch opens the wall to stained glass and coloured light, with linenfold panelling and the buffet; and the early Indian thread — the painted rock-cut interiors of Ajanta and Ellora, the temple sanctum sequence, and the floor-based domestic tradition (takht, charpai, bolsters).

The interior reconceived around classical antiquity, proportion and harmony — the palazzo and its cortile, coffered ceilings and the revived orders; the named furniture (the cassone marriage chest, the cassapanca chest-bench, the sgabello and the X-frame Savonarola and Dantesca chairs), the intarsia-clad studiolo, fresco and the grottesche ornament revived from Nero's buried Golden House; and the spread north — Fontainebleau and strapwork, and the bold carved oak of the Elizabethan and Jacobean interior, the great chamber, the court cupboard and the four-poster tester bed.

The age of the decorated interior — Baroque grandeur, drama and illusion at Versailles (the Hall of Mirrors, Le Brun, the ceremonial state bedchamber, marble and ormolu, Boulle marquetry), with the restrained Dutch bourgeois interior of Vermeer and Delft tiles as counterpoint; then Rococo intimacy and asymmetry — the salon and hôtel particulier, the rocaille and boiserie, the comfort revolution of the fauteuil and bergère, the commode, chinoiserie and porcelain; and the English 18th century, Palladian and Georgian, and the cabinetmakers led by Chippendale and his Director.

Neoclassicism — the disciplined reaction to Rococo, fired by the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum; Robert Adam's total integrated interiors and the 'Adam style', the Louis XVI style, Wedgwood Jasperware, and the revived Greek klismos closing the Western circle. Set beside a consolidated look at the parallel Indian interior — Mughal garden-connected pavilions and the diwan, floor seating on carpets and masnad bolsters, the jharokha and jali, parchin kari (pietra dura) and shish mahal mirror-work; Rajput palace murals; and the courtyard haveli as a domestic interior system — the bridge to Evolution of Interiors II.