History of intarsia

Where the word comes from

Intarsia comes from Italian: intarsio, from intarsiare, to inlay. The Italian word is usually traced back to the Arabic tarṣīʿ, meaning inlaying or setting. The same root is in the Spanish taracea, the word for the inlay work of Moorish Spain. The word alone tells you that the technique travelled across the Mediterranean.

What separates the terms today, intarsia, marquetry and inlay, is explained on intarsia, marquetry and inlay. For the history, a rough distinction is enough: early work was often inlaid into solid wood; from the seventeenth century onwards, veneer takes over, glued as a thin layer onto a substrate.

Beginnings: inlay in antiquity and the Middle Ages

Inlaid furniture already existed in ancient Egypt. Chests and boxes from the tombs show patterns of dark ebony and light ivory, exactly the contrast of light and dark that intarsia still lives on. The Romans knew inlay too, in wood as well as in stone.

In the Islamic world, inlay became an art of geometry. In Granada, under the Nasrid dynasty, doors, ceilings and chests were made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries with taracea: stars, bands and interlacing patterns of wood, bone and metal, built from many small, precisely cut pieces. The tradition lives on in Granada's workshops to this day.

Certosina and tarsia a toppo

In northern Italy, above all in Lombardy and the Veneto, certosina developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Tiny polygons of wood, bone or ivory are fitted into geometric patterns, stars and diamonds, often on caskets, frames and furniture. The name is linked to the Charterhouse of Pavia, the Certosa, whose furnishings show such work.

A related technique, tarsia a toppo, uses a trick that still shapes geometric work today: rods of different woods are glued into a block that carries the pattern in its cross-section, and thin slices are cut from that block. Every slice carries the same pattern. When you need many identical pieces, you solve the problem once on the block instead of piece by piece, an idea that returns in today's work with templates.

The Renaissance: pictures made of wood

In fifteenth-century Italy, wooden intarsia became an art of pictures. For choir stalls and sacristies, craftsmen made panels with city views, saints and still lifes whose depth comes entirely from the choice and arrangement of the woods. The intarsia makers worked with the same new central perspective as the painters, and some designs came from painters and architects.

The most famous examples are the studies of Federico da Montefeltro. The studiolo in Urbino was completed around 1476 and survives there to this day. The studiolo from his palace in Gubbio, made around 1478 to 1482, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In both rooms the walls show half-open cupboards with books, instruments and weapons, inlaid so precisely that the room seems larger than it is.

From this time also comes an insight that concerns every intarsia: light and shadow come from the wood itself. Where the natural colours were not enough, pieces were scorched in hot sand or stained. How light and dark are planned today is described on contrast and colour temperature.

Augsburg and Eger: the cabinets

In the sixteenth century, southern Germany became a centre of intarsia. Augsburg cabinetmakers built cabinets whose surfaces are covered in inlaid ruins, architecture and landscapes. The best-known piece is the Wrangel Cabinet of 1566. It was taken to Sweden as booty in the Thirty Years' War and is now in the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster.

In the seventeenth century, Eger, today's Cheb in Bohemia, developed a form of its own: Eger relief intarsia. The pictures are not only inlaid but partly carved, so they stand slightly proud of the surface. Eger produced cabinets, caskets and game boards for princes, nobility and clergy.

Boulle and Roentgen: marquetry as the art of furniture

In the France of Louis XIV, veneered marquetry became an art of its own. André-Charles Boulle set brass and tortoiseshell into one another: he cut both materials together as a stack and so got two versions of the same pattern, one light on dark and one dark on light. The principle that one cut gives positive and negative at once is still used in veneer work today.

In the eighteenth century, the workshop of Abraham and David Roentgen in Neuwied took pictorial marquetry to a high point. Instead of shading pieces in hot sand, David Roentgen built light and shadow from very small pieces of differently toned woods, often after designs by the painter Januarius Zick. His furniture went to courts all over Europe.

Biedermeier, yosegi and the modern age

In the Biedermeier period, the picture stepped back. Furniture lived from large, calm veneered surfaces whose figure was the ornament itself; inlays were often limited to narrow bands and lines. That attitude, letting the wood speak for itself, is still a standard for veneer work.

On the other side of the world, yosegi-zaiku appeared in Hakone, Japan, in the late Edo period. Woods in many natural colours are glued into rods and blocks with a geometric pattern and cut into thin slices, much like the Italian tarsia a toppo. The patterns of diamonds, hexagons and scales are pure geometry in undyed wood.

Around 1900, Art Nouveau revived pictorial marquetry, for example with Émile Gallé in Nancy and his plants and inscriptions in wood. In Vienna, artists of the Wiener Werkstätte designed furniture with strictly geometric inlays. In the twentieth century, veneer became an industrial material; handmade intarsia lived on in small workshops and regions, such as Sorrento with its tarsia sorrentina.

What the history means for intarsia today

Today most intarsia is made from veneer on a stable substrate, and a laser often cuts alongside knife and saw. Both historical lines are still there. The geometric line of taracea, certosina and yosegi lives on repetition, accuracy and a clear contrast of light and dark. The pictorial line from Urbino to Roentgen lives on the fact that wood can show light, movement and depth.

Photo: Reihax

Reihax works in both lines. The pen holders such as THINK BIGGER and FOCUS stand in the geometric tradition, the wall piece Flow with its free bands closer to the pictorial one. What they share is what the Egyptian chests already showed: the pattern comes from inlaid wood and its natural colours, not from print.

Photo: Reihax