Tarsia

TARSIA. - A craft practice consisting in joining on the surface fragments or veneers of differently colored woods in order to obtain, also by means of black mastic in the joints, effects similar to those of woodcut or painting; individual elements are set in place on the basis of a drawing with ornamental motifs or with figures.

Tarsia, or wooden inlay, was greatly in vogue in the late Middle Ages, applied to the decoration of small domestic objects and sacred furnishings, and during the early fifteenth century, to ornament furniture and especially chests and nuptial cassoni, particularly in Lombardy and the Veneto. Two types are distinguished in that period, both deriving, in style, from Oriental and Cosmatesque mosaics: the certosina type with polygonal tesserae, sometimes also in bone, mother-of-pearl and metal, with motifs of lozenges, small circles and little stars, and the geometric type, with a prevalence of panels and rosettes, also adopted in choir stalls and benches. But already at the beginnings of the Renaissance the pictorial tarsia established itself in Italy, and one of the first and most remarkable examples is found at Siena with the stalls of the Palazzo Pubblico (1429) by Domenico del Coro, who depicted in the panels scenes such as the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Shepherds. The luministic effects of that new manner were aided by the use of a very light wood, called silio, and by the application of a red-hot iron to the wooden inlay in order to obtain the shadows by blackening. The greatest fifteenth-century development of this art occurred in Florence, also thanks to the drawings supplied by painters and goldsmiths such as Baldovinetti, Maso Finiguerra, Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi. And the local architectural traditions were not extraneous to this development, that is, the marble inlays on the facades of Romanesque and Gothic buildings and of Leon Battista Alberti (S. Maria Novella and the little temple of the Holy Sepulchre). Among the most distinguished masters are numbered the brothers Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano. The former collaborated with Francesco di Giovanni, known as il Francione, in the Hall of the Lilies in the Palazzo Vecchio, portraying among other things the figures and works of Dante and Petrarch; he executed the most graceful choir stalls in the cathedral of Pisa and joined with Domenico del Tasso to exquisitely adorn the choir of the cathedral of Perugia.

Subsequently, Tuscany saw the flourishing of the inventions of Giuliano da Sangallo, son of the intarsia-maker Francesco di Bartolo Giamberti, of Ventura Vitoni of Pistoia, and of Baccio d'Agnolo, with his sons Giuliano, Filippo and Domenico. Another notable master of central Italy was Domenico d'Antonio Indivino da Sanseverino, who decorated the stalls of the upper basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. In the Ducal Palace of Urbino, the Florentine Baccio Pontelli presumably executed around 1480, under the guidance of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, admirable works for the doors of several halls and for the celebrated studiolo of Duke Federico da Montefeltro, where still lifes, geometric and vegetal motifs, most ingenious perspectives and allegorical figures are gathered, among them the three theological Virtues, after a design, it seems, by Sandro Botticelli. In northern Italy there excelled Bartolomeo dei Polli of Modena, working in the choir of the Certosa of Pavia after designs by the painter Ambrogio Borgognone, and above all the brothers Lorenzo and Cristoforo Canozi da Lendinara, who introduced the use of artificially colored woods, thereby multiplying the chromatic effects of intarsia, and left works of solemn Pierfrancescan imprint in the cathedral of Modena (panels with the figures of the four Evangelists) and in the Basilica of the Saint in Padua (1462-69). Their innovation was cultivated in the 16th century with seductive ornamental fertility by Fra Giovanni da Verona and by Fra Damiano da Bergamo, both educated in Venice in the school of Fra Sebastiano da Rovigno. To the former belong the magnificent intarsias in the choir of the monastery of Monteoliveto (1505) and in the church of S. Maria in Organo in Verona; to the latter, those of the doors of S. Pietro in Perugia (1535) and of the stalls of S. Domenico in Bologna (1541-49).

Worthy of note, among the decorative resources of these masters, who pushed picturesque virtuosity to its highest degree, are the views of buildings and streets with panoramic intent, where an attempt is made to obey the laws of aerial as well as linear perspective. Singular, moreover, for their figurative complexity, are the intarsias executed in the choir of S. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo (ca. 1530), after cartoons by the painter Lorenzo Lotto, by Gian Francesco Capodiferro di Lovere, a pupil of Fra Damiano da Bergamo. With the advent of Mannerism, wooden intarsia was replaced, in furniture for private use, by inlays in hardstones, while sacred furnishings grew heavy with massive projections, certainly not compatible with the linear polychromies of the Renaissance.

Only in the Rococo period did intarsia flourish again, principally in France, thanks to the great cabinetmakers André Charles Boulle, Charles Cressent, Riesener and others, who knew how to use the most precious woods, together with metals and tortoiseshell, for surface inlays rich in chromatic refinements and capricious arabesques. In Italy, the expert Venetian cabinetmakers came under their influence. Toward the end of that century and in the first decades of the 19th century, after the meticulous feats of the Piedmontese Pietro Piffetti, the Lombards Giuseppe and Carlo Francesco Maggiolini, of European fame, left an original mark with their restrained ornamentation for furniture with motifs of landscapes and flowers. In the last century the sporadic intarsia-makers limited themselves to tracing the figurative repertoire of times past, and a certain revival of taste was recorded in the last decades together with the progress of the art of wood engraving, as attested by the panels with Neo-Renaissance motifs, prepared by Edoardo Del Neri for the Casa Madre dei Mutilati, in Rome. - See plate CXXVIII.

Alberto Neppi