From the fall of Rome, when the city was finally sacked by Odoacer in 476, to the 15th century, when the Renaissance was already well advanced, information about the decoration of interiors is scarce. Its history has to be pieced together from surviving objects and illuminated manuscripts.
Byzantium
The capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople (formerly called Byzantium, later Stamboul, presently Istanbul) was a convenient meeting place for East and West. It felt the influence of Persian art and transmitted it to early medieval European Christian styles. Most surviving Byzantine interiors are ecclesiastical, although secular wall paintings and especially mosaics continued to be popular. The Iconoclasts of the 8th century, however, not only proscribed the making of images but destroyed most of those already existing. Ivory carving was highly developed, and furniture was inlaid with ivory plaques and decorated with carvings. Goldsmith’s work, which had existed in large quantities in ancient Rome, was equally popular in Constantinople. Decoration was usually of the repoussé type, with subjects from classical mythology. Very few gold objects have survived, and most bronze work has also been lost. Decorative textiles of fine quality were common, and a few fragments have survived. It is in some of the rare fragments of patterned silks of the 7th or 8th century that the Persian influence is most often to be found. Silk at one time was imported in vast quantities from China.
Constantinople tended to become increasingly an Oriental city as the Greek influence introduced by Alexander the Great waned in the Near and Middle East and the new civilization of Islām was established.
Early medieval Europe
In the constant warfare that was waged in Europe in the early medieval period, material possessions dwindled to a minimum: a man did not own for long anything he could not defend and had little use or opportunity for interior decoration. If he possessed more than one house, his furniture and possessions would go with him from place to place. During this time, the arts came to be monopolized by the church, which grew to dominate all aspects of the medieval world.
By the 9th century the Romanesque style was well established in northern Europe. It made far greater use of the semicircular arch and vaulting than had the Imperial Roman style. Much of the sculpture decorating buildings was influenced by the Middle East. The court of Charlemagne in the 9th century was in communication with that of the caliph Hārūn ar-Rashīd, in Baghdad, and the Arabs had opened up a sea route between the Persian Gulf and China. Oriental textiles, imported through Venice and Genoa, began to be found in the more luxurious European interiors, and in the 13th century the first piece of Chinese porcelain, brought back by Marco Polo, found its way to the West and is still preserved in the treasury of St. Mark’s, Venice.
Late into the medieval period, the larger houses, generally called castles, were designed according to military rather than aesthetic principles. The main room was a spacious hall with timber or stone walls (sometimes plastered), an open-beamed roof, narrow slit windows (as yet unglazed), and a floor of stone slabs, tiles, or beaten earth. In the earlier houses the fire burned in the centre of the floor, and the smoke either drifted through a central hole in the roof or dispersed among the rafters; but wall fireplaces soon replaced this unsatisfactory system. Furniture was probably limited to plain stools, benches, and trestle tables, made of local timber, and some heavy chests in which personal possessions were stored. The feudal lord and his lady sat on more elaborate chairs on the dais (raised platform), and a coloured hanging of plain fabric sometimes decorated the wall behind them. Wall hangings and tapestries became more common in Norman times (1066–1189), when stone carving on doorways, fireplaces, window openings, column capitals, and arcading superimposed on the inside walls was also introduced. Such hangings can still be seen in the Norman castles of Rochester, Kent, and Chepstow in England. The whole community often lived and slept in the one hall, but as time went on, two main rooms—the hall and the chamber—were provided. At first, rooms were divided by woolen hangings, hung from iron rods or from the rafters. The houses of the poor were simple, timber-framed shelters with bare earth floors and undecorated walls. Such conditions, with variations according to local circumstances, were generally prevalent in western Europe until the end of the 12th century.
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