The Quinta das Cruzes Museum (QCM) on the island of Madeira has a collection of utilitarian furniture made from endemic and exotic wood from Brazil, from the 15th century to the first quarter of the 16th century. A museological group related to the importance of the economic cycle of sugar initially produced on the island, which was worthy of a guided tour, in the framework of the conferences of "Dar a ver", presented by Teresa Cupertino da Câmara.
In a brief introduction on "sugar boxes", this designation, which was initially attributed to packaging for the transport of sugar, was rapidly generalized as a measure of cargo and also as pointed out by the Regional Director of Museums and Heritage, Francisco Clode, extended to the furniture "is a Madeiran characteristic when we do not know certain thing we give it an alternative name, mobile sugar box, no one knows for sure what it is, but we have this capacity in ignorance, or in the difficulty of finding a designation that is the best way to characterize a set of woods that came from Brazil and that we did not know. "
The ark is the primordial furniture for the rest that depart of this typology, executed in box of sugar, is a furniture of contain, served as bench, or table, or bed when it had a very compressed size, also served to place a small mattress of straw or dry leaves on the inside. It is a transport furniture because it has two sides, with a V-shaped wrought iron. This ark is not the oldest furniture, because it is from the eighteenth century, which was made with wood that came from Brazil and was used by local masters.
The construction of the furniture is made, as a rule, by assembly with the joint on the sides, without nails, both from the back and the front. This furniture has a swallow tail that is the clasp. In this time until 1670 we speak of carpenters, a long after appeared the wood artisans, due to the appearance of the regiments that needed to build furniture.
One of the greatest difficulties in the sugar boxes is determining the types of wood used, because there is little literature on the subject, they are very varied and often confused with each other, because until a transverse lamina is withdrawn to be studied at the institute of civil engineering to know the type of wood, it is impossible to determine its exact origin.
People who have bent over the study of sugar boxes claim that it may be Jequitibá (cariniana spp) and only this wood has 800 varieties and all with different colors, like “tapinhoá” (Mezilaurus navalium), or “inbuia” (ocotea sp.), but this last one is a very dark wood and I cannot state the origin. A study carried out by Lília Esteves on the pieces of this room concluded that it was not possible to verify the woods in which the furniture was built, because she needed to take a transverse blade and all she could get was a section of one of the drawers and discovered that they were made with scraps of wood. The good one was thus saved for the exterior, but was not used in the interior, for example, the lateral parts of the furniture were often made with several types of wood.
This parallelepipedal furniture is of the seventeenth century, with a certain taste and refinement to climb to apparatus furniture, it has a projecting frame in holy wood that is jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia), but also there are 90 varieties only of this arboreal species. So, all we know is that it arrives here and it's an exotic and large wood. This furniture had many functionalities and was changing typology, were created two drawers below and has legs.
The counters are made with stinkwood, it is an ark that will open with a downward stop, it is also a furniture of transport. The man of this time, with a less sedentary life, had to move from one side to another and so, appeared the wings of one side to facilitate their transport. It has a cross-shaped tremor that is original. It is a linen folded door that has a scissors-shaped closure. The drawers were to store jewelry, money, or other small things.
The inlaid have a very special technique different from Italy where they were sought after, which could not be cut and fitted, they used stinkwood (Ocotea foetens), plathymenia (Plathymenia foliolosa) and ash (Fraxinus angustifolia), which were later forbidden to be cut because they were being extinguished, it should be noted that in order to make 15 kilos of sugar, 15 kilos of chopped wood was needed to produce this essential good.
The furnishings of the Azores, the sculptural decoration chests, thought to be from Italy, after all come from Terceira Island, which was a port of call for America and India and one of the things Gaspar Frutuoso addresses in "Saudades da terra" was that they made more beautiful arches than those of Nuremberg. It was later concluded that there is a large amount of cedar in these coffers, because it was a very common wood in the Azorean islands. The decorative grammar is not gravitational as it was made in Italy, the drawing is excavated, introducing a Jewish bitumen to darken the drawing.
The footstool has its origin in the ark, has drawers, with a table top that serves as a bench, where is a game of chess, from the sixteenth century. IT is a decorative grammar that repeats itself in other pieces.
The Philippine table with a leg in the shape of a lyre, eventually served as a tripod for this furniture, because the museum was not only created with donations, this furniture is not exposed, was acquired last year, QCM is an open collection of the collector Cesar Gomes and later from the regional government with great financial effort. It is a piece that was for sale in an antiquarian in Lisbon and although it has undergone some alterations has a very rare typology linked to Azorean furniture, in cedar, it is a sort of cabinet. It is not a counter-office, when it is only counter has no door, has a French and Flemish furniture influence, because it is a mobile apparatus, with a very renaissance characteristic, with arabesques, the motifs are drawn from the decorative Spanish Moorish grammar, which appears in the sixteenth century and extends to the seventeenth, but which must be well studied. The knobs are in scissor-shaped, with a type of flap around the facade of the drawer to beautify.
These pieces of furniture by their separated movable typology are called two bodies, or drawers, that also comes from the ark, arose by necessity to save the utensils, the silverware, or ceramics, or the faience of the companies of the Indies. It originates in the Flemish influence and has been adapted by the woodworkers in their own way, so no two are the same. It has diamond mouths, shows the knowledge of what was done in Europe, the locks are wrought iron. The door rudders are flowered, it's a T-shaped closure, it's a stand-up furniture, not for cups, it's from the pantry, where things were stored from the houses, like the dishes.
