CURULE SEAT

A curler seat is a design of chair noted for its uses in Ancient Rome and Europe through to the 20th century. Its status in early Rome as a symbol of political or military power carried over to other civilizations, as it was also utilized in this regard by kings in Europe, Napoleon, and others.
In the Roman Republic, and Empire, the curler chair (sell caulis, supposedly from cures, "chariot") was the seat upon which magistrates holding imperia were entitled to sit. This includes dictators, magistrate equate, consuls, praetors, curler audiles, and the promagistrates, temporary or de facto holders of such offices. Additionally, the censors and the Flame of Jupiter (Flame Dials) were also allowed to sit on a curler seat, though these positions did not hold imperia. Livy writes that the three famines majors or high priests of the Archaic Triad of major gods were each granted the honor of the curler chair.

According to Livy the curler seat, like the Roman toga, originated in Etruria, and it has been used on surviving Etruscan monuments to identify magistrates. However, much earlier stools supported on a cross-frame are known from the New Kingdom of Egypt. One of the earliest recorded examples of the curler chair proper was in 494 BC when the honor of a curler chair in the circus maximums was awarded to the Roman dictator Manaus Valerie’s Maximums as a result of his victory over the Sabine’s. According to Cassius Dior, early in 44 BC a senate decree granted Julius Caesar the curler seat everywhere except in the theatre, where his gilded chair and jeweled crown were carried in, putting him on a par with the gods. As a form of throne, the sell might be given as an honor to foreign kings recognized formally as allies by the Roman people or senate. The curler chair is also used on Roman medals as well as funerary monuments to express curler magistracy; when traversed by haste, it is the symbol of Juno.

In Rome, the curler chair was traditionally made of or veneered with ivory, with curved legs forming a wide X; it had no back, and low arms. Although often of luxurious construction, this chair was meant to be uncomfortable to sit on for long periods of time, the double symbolism being that the official was expected to carry out his public function in an efficient and timely manner, and that his office, being an office of the republic, was temporary, not perennial. The chair could be folded, and thus was easily transportable; this accords with its original function for magisterial and promagisterial commanders in the field. It developed a hieratic significance, expressed in fictive curler seats on funerary monuments, a symbol of power which was never entirely lost in post-Roman European tradition. 6th-century consular ivory diptychs of Orestes and of Constantine’s each depict the consul seated on an elaborate curler seat with crossed animal legs.
Along the Silk Road the folding seat of the Eastern Roman Empire made its way to China, where in various forms including the hub chuan— the "barbarian bed"— it "transformed the dress, architecture and lifestyle of the Chinese" In Han China the folding chair made its first literary mark in the 2nd century AD, used out-of-doors in a military rather than domestic setting, and from the way it was addressed in a poem by Yu Janus, written about 552
By the name handed down you are from a foreign region
Coming into [China] and being used in the capital
With legs leaning your frame adjusts by it
With limbs slanting your body levels by itself...
It is clear the cross-framed folding seat was intended.

In Gaul the Merovingian successors to Roman power employed the curler seat as an emblem of their right to dispense justice, and their Captain successors retained the iconic seat: the "Throne of Dogbert", of cast bronze retaining traces of its former gilding, is conserved in the Bibliothèque national de France. The "throne of Dogbert" is first mentioned in the 12th century, already as a treasured relic, by Abbot Sugar, who claims in his Administration, "We also restored the noble throne of the glorious King Dogbert, on which, as tradition relates, the Frankish kings sat to receive the homage of their nobles after they had assumed power. We did so in recognition of its exalted function and because of the value of the work itself." Abbot Sugar added bronze upper members with foliated scrolls and a back-piece. The "Throne of Dogbert" was coarsely repaired and used for the coronation of Napoleon.
In the 15th century, a characteristic folding-chair of both Italy and Spain was made of numerous shaped cross-framed elements, joined to wooden members that rested on the floor and further made rigid with a wooden back. 19th-century dealers and collectors termed these "Dante Chairs" or "Savonarola Chairs", with disregard to the centuries intervening between the two figures. Examples of curler seats were redrawn from a 15th-century manuscript of the Roman de Reynaud de Montalba and published in Henry Shaw's Specimens of Ancient Furniture (1836).

The 15th or early 16th-century curler seat that survives at York Minster, originally entirely covered with textiles, has rear members extended upwards to form a back, between which a rich textile was stretched. The cross-framed armchair, no longer actually a folding chair, continued to have regal connotations. James I of England was portrayed with such a chair, its framing entirely covered with a richly patterned silk damask textile, with decorative nailing, in Paul van Somers’s portrait. Similar early 17th-century cross-framed seats survive at Knoll, perquisites from a royal event.
The photo of actor Edwin Booth as Hamlet poses him in a regal cross-framed chair, considered suitably medieval in 1870.
The form found its way into stylish but non-royal decoration in the archaeological second phase of neoclassicism in the early 19th century. An unusually early example of this revived form is provided by the large sets of richly carved and gilded pliant (folding stools) forming part of long sets with matching tabourets delivered in 1786 to the royal châteaux of Compiegne and Fontainebleau. With their Imperial Roman connotations, the backless curler seats found their way into furnishings for Napoleon, who moved some of the former royal pliant into his state bedchamber at Fontainebleau.