Cabinet (room)

With its origins in requirements for increased privacy for reading and meditation engendered by the humanist avocation of many of the Italian noble and mercantile elite in the Quattrocento, the studiolo provided a retreat often reachable only through the, comparatively public, bedroom.

The standard fittings of the late medieval and early modern study can be inventoried among the conventional trappings in portrayals of Saint Jerome in illuminated manuscripts, in paintings, or in engravings like those of Albrecht Dürer (illustration): a chair; perhaps a footstool to lift the feet from the draughty floor; a portable desk with a slanted surface for writing; and a table, bearing a book-rest, perhaps with a weighted ribbon to hold a book open at a place, and a candlestick (to supplement the light from the window, which is often shuttered but also which often has a window seat in the depth of the wall).

In Domenico Ghirlandaio's Saint Jerome in his Study, shelving runs around the room at the level of the frieze, on it are curious objects, containers of various types, and large volumes lying on their sides.

Perhaps the grandest studiolo was the Camerino ("little room") of Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara, for which the greatest painters of the day were commissioned from about 1512-1525 to paint mythological canvases, very large by the standards of the time.

Dosso Dossi, Alphonso's court painter, completed the room with a large painting (now lost) and ten small oblong subjects to go as a frieze above the others.

[2] In Elizabethan England, such a private retreat would most likely be termed a closet, the most recent in a series of developments in which people of means found ways to withdraw by degrees from the public life of the household as it was lived in the late medieval great hall.

David Rizzio was murdered when dining with his putative lover Mary, Queen of Scots in "a cabinet abowte xii footes square, in the same a little low reposinge bedde, and a table".

[citation needed] Since the reign of King George I, the Cabinet – derived from the room – has been the principal executive group of British government, and the term has been adopted in most English-speaking countries.

[7] At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the architect Le Vau contrived a jewel-like private cabinet for the king's minister of finance Nicolas Fouquet that was entirely hung with panels of Venetian looking-glass; later, Louis XIV's Grand Cabinet at Versailles (swept away in 18th-century revisions in the name of even more private royal spaces) was similarly mirror-lined: "the king's self-directed gaze was at once religious and narcissistic" as Orest Ranum has observed.