Cabinet (Fassadenschrank) early 17th century German, Nuremberg During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Central Europe, the term “woodworker” did not define a single trade. Instead, there were cabinetmakers and chairmakers, each represented by their own guild. The lathe-turned parts of wooden furniture could not be made in the shop but had to be bought from members of an independent turners’ guild and the hardware ordered from a master blacksmith. This complex system had been developed to protect guild members from outside competition and to guarantee them a minimum wage. Each master—

Cabinet (Fassadenschrank) early 17th century German, Nuremberg During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Central Europe, the term “woodworker” did not define a single trade. Instead, there were cabinetmakers and chairmakers, each represented by their own guild. The lathe-turned parts of wooden furniture could not be made in the shop but had to be bought from members of an independent turners’ guild and the hardware ordered from a master blacksmith. This complex system had been developed to protect guild members from outside competition and to guarantee them a minimum wage. Each master—that is, each qualified member of a guild—was allowed to employ only two journeymen and one or sometimes two apprentices. Only the artisans who worked for one of the many courts of the scattered German territorial states were exempt from these regulations.[1]Apprentices in the extremely conservative cabinetmakers’ guild were required to create a masterpiece, or chef d’oeuvre, of highly complicated design in order to qualify as a master. The guilds in different German towns—from the free imperial cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg in southern Germany to the urban strongholds of the Hanseatic League in the north—had diverse requirements for masterpieces. Nor were all the candidates for mastership in a given guild treated equally in this respect. A “foreign” journeyman—and in the patchwork configuration of states in the Holy Roman Empire, that might mean a man born a stone’s throw from the boundary lines of the region under a guild’s control—often had to produce a more elaborate and costlier masterpiece than a local applicant for membership. A guild member’s son or son-in-law or the prospective husband of a master’s widow, all of whom were likely to acquire an already established workshop, were also assigned an easier task.[2] The cabinet piece not only had to demonstrate the design skills of the journeyman and his acquaintance with the architectura

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