Vertiginous

Nicholas Penny

• Grands Décors français 1650-1800 by Bruno Pons
  Faton, 439 pp, £130.00, June 1995, ISBN 2 87844 023 4
• The Rococo Interior by Katie Scott
  Yale, 342 pp, £39.95, November 1995, ISBN 0 300 04582 4
• Chardin by Marianne Roland Michel, translated by Eithne McCarthy
  Thames and Hudson, 293 pp, £60.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 500 09259 1

The rococo style transformed the character of the domestic interior. First in France, where the style originated in the late 17th century, and then in the rest of Europe, rooms were created which were lighter and more elegant and charming than those of any previous period. They were also audacious, often astonishingly so, in their treatment of space and their denial of solidity or stability. It is easy to forget this because these rooms are more easily reconciled with modern ideas of luxury and comfort than those decorated in any other historical style. De Troy’s famous painting, The Reading from Molière illustrated on the dust-jacket of Katie Scott’s study of the rococo interior, seems to epitomise an ideal of polite but informal and mixed society which is still current. However, those who feel at ease with rococo furniture today do so because it is old and familiar. Originally it seemed novel and fantastic.