Much of what is known of furniture before the pattern books comes from the pieces that survive and from pictures of rooms: the bronze couches and tables of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the painted cassoni of Florence, the furniture still in the houses it was made for. Rules cited to this source are taken from those pieces, measured.
The furniture of the Greeks is known almost entirely from pictures, on painted vases and carved grave reliefs; that of the Romans from the pieces buried at Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79, the bronze fittings of couches and the marble tables of the atria, and from wall paintings. The Italian Renaissance left its marriage chests, its chairs and tables in the palaces and museums of Florence and Venice, and its rooms in the paintings of Carpaccio and Ghirlandaio.
From the seventeenth century the evidence is richer: inventories that list what stood in each room, and whole suites of furniture still in the rooms they were made for, at Ham House and Knole, at Houghton, Osterley and Kedleston, at Versailles and Malmaison. American furniture of the Federal years survives in large numbers, much of it in the Metropolitan Museum and Winterthur.