Once you get hooked into Savonarola, as I have in several posts here since the early spring, he shows up everywhere.
I was watching an interior design show and someone identified a chair as a “Savonarola chair.” I almost fainted. How did I live to be this age and spend as much time in Italy and studying Italian art and culture and never hear that this type of chair has this type of name?!!
Above is a sea of Savonarola chairs, at my favorite spot about 20 minutes from my home. I go there almost every Saturday morning. It’s become kind of a ritual, to start my weekend.
I’ve sat on many of these chairs while studying the gorgeous Renaissance fresco, plus I have seen these chairs and sat on many of them all over Italy. And again, never did I know the name!
An X-chair (also scissors chair, Dante chair or Savonarola chair) is a chair with an x-shaped frame. The form was known to have been used in Ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece. The Christian faldstool is a type of X-chair. Did you just say to yourself, but what is a faldstool? I did and looked it up and I thank you, Wikipedia:
Faldstool (from the O.H. Ger. falden or falten, “to fold,” and stuol, Mod. Ger. Stuhl, “stool”; from the medieval Latin faldistolium derived, through the old form fauesteuil, from the Mod. Fr. fauteuil) is a portable folding chair, used by a bishop when not occupying the throne in his own cathedral, or when officiating in a cathedral or church other than his own; hence any movable folding stool used during divine service.
All of the folding stools above, my friends, are faldstools.
Wikipedia says this about the so-called Savonarola chair:
A type of folding chair with a frame like an X viewed from the front or the side originated in medieval Italy. Also known as a Savonarola or Dante chair in Italy, or a Luther chair in Germany, the X-chair was a light and practical form that spread through Renaissance Europe. In England, the Glastonbury chair made an X-shape by crossing the front and back legs, while in Spain X-chairs were inlaid with ivory and metals in the Moorish designs.
The use of the name Savonarola chair comes from a 19th-century trade term evoking Girolamo Savonarola, which is a folding armchair of the type standardized during the Italian Renaissance. It is said that a chair like this was found in Savonarola’s small room (known as a cell, but having nothing to do with prison) at the monastery of San Marco right here in Florence! Who knows if that is true, but it is said that’s where the name comes from. It’s a good story, regardless.
The chair in the illustration consists of a wooden flat-arched back rail carved with a coat-of-arms in low relief and connected to the back of the straight arms of the chair and a seat made of narrowly fitted wooden slats. The wood used in the construction of the chair is the typical walnut, as in other gothic and renaissance furniture.
From this source:
We also learn:
Savonarola Chair: This is another type of X-frame folding chair with arm rests and a back rest, but instead of having four legs, it has several narrow wooden slats, also typically wavy like Dante chairs. It was also named in the 19th century for a famous Renaissance figure, in this case the moralistic Dominican friar who led Florence during the 1490s and is famous for his Bonfire of the Vanities. It is possible that Savonarola did in fact have a chair like this, since monks often used folding chairs in their small cells (below).
get back, lauretta! 
How comfortablear they, really? Is it a case of ‘bring your cushion’?
Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t want to watch a movie or read a book while sitting on one of the chairs or stools! But they certainly are handsome! :-)