Note 38 — FURNITURE

Cordova was a famous centre of this craft for many centuries. Ramírez de Arellano has found and published a notice relative to Lope de Liaño and García Alonso, two artificers of this city who signed, on January 7th, 1572, a contract with the prior of the monastery of the Holy Martyrs to build a ceiling for one of the chapels of the same. The document, which is quoted in extenso in the Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones for November, 1900, abounds in technical expressions, many of them partly or entirely Moorish.

The same writer publishes the names (hitherto completely unrecorded) of thirteen other artist-carpenters who worked at Cordova in the latter half of the sixteenth century and early in the seventeenth. The craft, in fact, died hard, and ceilings of this kind, replete with Moorish detail, were made in certain parts of Southern Spain until the closing moments of the eighteenth century.