The most noticeable feature in modern carved surface decoration is the almost universal tendency to overcrowding. It appears seldom to have occurred to the craftsman or designer that decorating a panel, for instance, is not at all the same thing as covering it with decoration. Still less does he seem to have felt that occasionally some portions of the ground are much more valuable in the design than anything which he can put on them. Indeed, the thoughtful designer who understands its use and appreciates its value, frequently has more trouble with his ground than with anything else in the panel. Also, if he have the true decorative spirit, his mind is constantly on the general scheme surrounding his work, and he is always ready to subordinate himself and his work in order that it may enhance and not disturb this general scheme.
We will suppose, for example, that he has to decorate a column with raised ornament. He feels at once that the outlines of that column are of infinitely more importance than anything which he can put on it, however ingenious or beautiful his design may be. He therefore keeps his necessary projecting parts as small and low as possible, leaving as much of the column as he can showing between the lines of his pattern. By this means the idea of strength and support is not interfered with, and the tout ensemble is not destroyed.
This may seem somewhat elementary to many who will read it. My excuse must be that one sees many columns in which every vestige of the outline is so covered by the carving which has been built round them, that the idea of their supporting anything other than their ornament appears preposterous.
There has been no opportunity to do more than glance at such a subject as this in a space so limited; but the purposes of this paper will have been served if it has supplied a useful hint to any craftsman, or if by its means any designer shall have been induced to make a more thorough study of the materials within his reach.
INTARSIA AND INLAID WOOD-WORK
Although decoration by inlaying woods of different colours must naturally have suggested itself in very early times, as soon indeed as there were workmen of skill sufficient for it, the history of this branch of art practically begins in the fifteenth century. It is eminently an Italian art, which according to Vasari had its origin in the days of Brunelleschi and Paolo Uccello; and it had its birth in a land which has a greater variety of mild close-grained woods with a greater variety of colour than Northern Europe. By the Italians it was regarded as a lower form of painting. Like all mosaic, of which art it is properly a branch, it has its limitations; and it is only so long as it confines itself to these that it is a legitimate form of decoration. Tarsia is at the best one of the minor decorative arts, but when well employed it is one that gives an immense deal of pleasure, and one to which it cannot be denied that the buildings of Italy owe much of their splendour. Their polished and inlaid furniture harmonises with the rare delicacy of their marble and mosaic, and goes far towards producing that air of rich refinement and elaborate culture which is to the severer styles and simpler materials of the North what the velvet-robed Senator of St. Mark was to the mail-clad feudal chief from beyond the Alps. As to its durability, the experience of four centuries since Vasari's time has proved that with ordinary care, or perhaps with nothing worse than mere neglect, Intarsia will last as long as painting. Its only real enemy is damp, as will be readily understood from the nature of the materials and the mode of putting them together. For though in a few instances, when the art was in its infancy, the inlaid pattern may have been cut of a substantial thickness and sunk into a solid ground ploughed out to receive it, this method was obviously very laborious, and admitted only of very simple design, for it is very difficult in this way to keep the lines of the drawing accurately. The recognised way of making Intarsia was, and is, to form both pattern and ground in thin veneers about 1/16 of an inch thick, which are glued down upon a solid panel. At first sight this method may appear too slight and unsubstantial for work intended to last for centuries, but it has, in fact, stood the test of time extremely well, when the work has been kept in the dry even temperature of churches and great houses, where there is neither damp to melt the glue and swell the veneer, nor excessive heat to make the wood shrink and start asunder. When these conditions were not observed, of course the work was soon ruined, and Vasari tells an amusing story of the humiliation which befell Benedetto da Majano, who began his career as an Intarsiatore, in the matter of two splendid chests which he had made for Matthias Corvinus, from which the veneers, loosened by the damp of a sea voyage, fell off in the royal presence.
The veneers being so thin, it is of course easy to cut through several layers of them at once, and this suggested, or at all events lent itself admirably to the design of the earlier examples, which are generally arabesques symmetrically disposed right and left of a central line. If two dark and two light veneers are put together, the whole of one panel, both ground and pattern, can be cut at one operation with a thin fret saw; the ornamental pattern drops into the space cut out of the ground, which it, of course, fits exactly except for the thickness of the saw-cut, and the two half-patterns thus filled in are "handed" right and left, and so complete the symmetrical design. The line given by the thickness of the saw is then filled in with glue and black colour so as to define the outline, and additional saw-cuts are made or lines are engraved, and in either case filled in with the same stopping, wherever additional lines are wanted for the design. It only remains to glue the whole down to a solid panel, and to polish and varnish the surface, and it is then ready to be framed into its place as the back of a church stall, or the lining of a courtly hall, library, or cabinet.
It was thus that the simpler Italian Intarsia was done, such as that in the dado surrounding Perugino's Sala del Cambio in his native city, where the design consists of light arabesques in box or some similar wood on a walnut ground, defined by black lines just as I have described.