In Germany the veneers used are one to two millimetres thick, i.e., one-twenty-fifth or two-twenty-fifths of an inch. The principal woods used are walnut, pear, ash, bird maple, holly, olive, amboyna, rose wood, violet wood, thuya, and palisander, which name is also used on the Continent for rose wood and violet, though it is really a sort of cedar. Tortoiseshell, ivory, and metal plates are also used, principally of pewter, brass, and zinc. Seeman's Kunstgewerbliche Handbücher advise thus:—"When ivory or hard precious metals are used it is better to divide the design into smaller parts. To avoid damage to the effect by time and change of colour in the woods such combinations as the following are to be preferred:—Mahogany and black walnut, pear and black walnut, Hungarian ash and black thuya, pear and palisander, brass and black, etc. For fine, small ornament smooth, even-textured woods should be used such as pear, mahogany, maple, or holly; for broad patches and backgrounds, which are not required to be dark, you should use patterned or streaked woods, like bird maple, amboyna, thuya, or olive. Ivory, mother-of-pearl, and metals in large pieces look hard and loud, so it is better to use them in quite small pieces. If engraved, larger pieces may be employed and used for inscription tablets, coats of arms, and cartouches, or for bits of figures, birds, and butterflies. Shading may be done in various ways. Lines may be engraved and filled up with a glue cement, or hatchings may be drawn with a scorching solution, or the wood may be burnt with hot sand. The sand is made hot in an iron pot, and the piece to be darkened inserted. Or it may be scorched with a hot iron or spirit or gas flame. The simplest way is with the poker used in poker work." In England the sand is heaped upon a metal plate which is heated underneath. The veneer is held with tweezers and pushed into the sand, the gradation of heat giving gradation of tone. The hot sand shrinks the wood, and allowance must be made for this.
Veneers are both saw and knife cut; the saw wastes about as much as the thickness cut in sawdust. They range from 8 to 15 to the inch. The French saw-cut their veneers thinner than the English do.
The woods in every-day use at the present day are white holly, box, pear (in various shades), and holly (dyed all colours); while the veneer merchants sometimes supply also planetree, sycamore, chestnut, Brazilwood, yellow fustic, barwood, tulipwood, kingwood, East and West India satinwood, rosewood, ebony, ash, harewood, Indian purplewood, hornbeam, and snakewood. Bird's-eye maple and partridgewood may also be bought.
Dye woods used for marquetry—Braziletto, cam wood, logwood, Nicaragua, red sanders, sapan, ebony, fustic (a species of mulberry), Zante (a species of sumach). "Ebony is the black pear tree of Madagascar, at least they make cider of its fruit." So says M. Luchet in an interesting excursus on furniture manufacture in his book on the Paris Exhibition of 1867, in which he gives further details of ancient manufacture and its modern imitation. "I know a factory," he says, "where the tortoiseshell is false, the mother-of-pearl false, the ivory holly wood; the brass is the only real thing, because science applied to industry has not yet found out how to imitate it. When Boulle employed wood in his work it was ebony—they have abandoned that for blackened pear wood, under the pretext that ebony is a hard, close wood which twists, splits, and cracks, takes glue badly, and refuses varnish. So that they call a man who never uses ebony 'ébéniste.' They did not trouble about these things in the time of Louis XIV. They never varnished their furniture, so it did not matter that ebony would not take varnish.... There are two sorts of tortoiseshell, that of the Antilles, often bad and scaly, but good enough for common work, because it is thin and equal in thickness, and a little carmine vermilion gives it a not unpleasant red tint. The Indian tortoiseshell is thick and opaque and unequal, demanding preparation and welding. It can only be used for expensive work, and takes easily a black preparation which makes it magnificently austere." One ought to mention here that good shell was often treated with carmine vermilion or with gold, and that without a colour background it loses half its beauty and value.
"In modern times six or eight couples of shell and metal are sawn together, whereas two was the number in the fine period. This saves money. A new Boulle bed, secretary, or chest of drawers should cost 15 to 20,000 francs. You may easily get one for 2000 made of rubbish. An honest chest of drawers with tolerable mountings is worth 1500 francs. In gelatine tortoiseshell and brass or zinc of the future 100 is the price.... The mode still practised in Paris of making a good 'placage' in preparation for marquetry or Boulle work is as follows:—A thicker or thinner sheet of Italian poplar is placed between two sheets of oak with the grain the other way, then on the external sheet of oak is placed the wood intended to be seen, also with the grain the other way, the whole of convenient thickness, and glued with the best glue. Good glue is the nurse of the wood, say the masters. These four or five thicknesses of wood pulling against each other neutralise all bad effects, and the result is very good. The external covering is usually either mahogany, American walnut, or violet wood (a sort of cedar). Sometimes it is ebony, or perhaps a collection of small pieces of wood, such as acacia, which are called by all sorts of pretty names. It is of this fine and good 'plaqué' that they still make cupboards at 1000 francs, beds at 600 francs, and bureaus at 800 francs, which are the success and the pride of Parisian joinery." The marqueteurs of Nice made use of olive for veined grey backgrounds, orange and lemon for pale yellow, carob for dark red, jujube tree for rose colour, holly for white, and charred fig for black; arbutus served for dark flesh, and sumach for light.
It is advisable after the marquetry has been put together to reduce the surface to a level and do something in the way of polishing, though it is not necessary to carry the process as far as is often done by the cheap furniture manufacturers. If nothing but wood has been used, the surface should be reduced to a level with a toothing plane and scraped with a joiner's scraper, taking care to apply it obliquely to the joints as far as possible, so as to avoid digging down and so failing in the object aimed at. If done very well and carefully it sometimes only requires to be rubbed down with its own shavings, but it is more usually necessary to follow with a worn piece of glass-paper on a flat piece of cork, but the dust must not be allowed to collect into hard lumps upon it, as these lumps would scratch the surface. Holtzapffel says that when metal, ivory, pearl, shell, or tortoiseshell are mixed with the wood the surface must be carefully levelled with flat files, ending with a very smooth one, after which the scraper should be used if possible and followed by glass or emery paper very sparingly. When metal preponderates emery paper is best, and really good sand paper may also be used, but all paper should have very little "cut," should be applied dry, and allowed to become clogged, so as to act principally as a hard dry rubber or burnisher. If the polishing is at all in excess the wood will get rubbed or worn down below the metal. The fine finish required when tortoiseshell and metal are used is got by rubbing with blocks of charcoal used endways with oil and the finest rotten-stone powder, much like polishing marble, using oil instead of water. Wet polishing should not be used for inlaid works; the water may soften the glue. A superficial wetting is likely to warp the woods and make them curl up at the edges, and the grain of the wood is almost certain to rise. Oil is better than water, but light woods are almost certain to become stained by polishing powders and fluid. To avoid this modern marquetry is often covered with varnish applied with friction like French polish, or laid on in several coats with a brush and polished off with pumice and rotten stone, like the Vernis Martin, being first levelled with a file or scraper and smoothed with glass-paper.
THE LIMITATIONS AND CAPABILITIES OF THE ART
The process described, by which the early works in intarsia were produced, was slow and tedious; and, as may be supposed, though fame might be won by its exercise, the winning of fortune was a very different thing. Domenico di Nicolò, who made the stalls in the chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, and was thence called "del Coro," or "dei Cori," a name which descended to his children in place of their proper name of Spinelli, is an example in point. The petitions to the priors already referred to, printed in Milanesi's Documenti per la Storia dell' Arte Senese, show how little a man of talent, who was constantly employed for many years and gained great reputation in his art, could do to provide for his old age; and many returns of both painters, sculptors, and woodworkers, made for the purposes of taxation and printed in the same book, show that even in a great and flourishing town like Siena, which prided itself on its artistic reputation, it was often most difficult for the craftsmen, on whose work that reputation was based, to make a living.[4] It is true that there were thirty-four workshops for wood carving and intarsia in Florence at one time (1478, as Fabroni says in his life of Lorenzo the Magnificent), from which one may conclude that work of a certain sort was plentiful and lucrative, and panels of intarsia were certainly sometimes exported, but it may be observed that all the most celebrated intarsiatori practised some other form of art also, and generally abandoned intarsia sooner or later; the exceptions being those who belonged to the Olivetan and Dominican orders, and therefore had no anxiety about their living. Of these craftsmen the most celebrated were Fra Giovanni da Verona and Fra Damiano of Bergamo, whose works were so elaborate and so finely executed as to excite the suspicion that they were painted with the brush, though supposed to be executed with wood and the chisel. The anecdote of the Emperor Charles V.'s trial of Fra Damiano's tarsia panel in S. Domenico, Bologna, attests the wonderful quality of the work, and its success in attaining a doubtful aim, and Barili's inscription in the panel showing himself at work shows that it was not uncommon for such panels to be supposed to be the work of the brush. The designs from which the intarsia was executed were often furnished by painters of repute, and pictures or portions of pictures were copied, a proceeding which Fra Giovanni's discovery of stains and washes of different kinds made easier, until the proper limits of the art were far overpassed, and its decorative quality quite lost sight of in the attempt to rival a form of art the requirements of which were quite different. The beautiful arabesques, which the designers of the early Renaissance poured forth with exhaustless fertility, show the capabilities of the process for decorating flat surfaces, and the perspectives of cupboards and buildings were often most successful without passing the limits imposed by the material.
The question of the limits within which the craftsman's effort should be confined in any form of art craftsmanship is a thorny one, for the attempt to overstep those limits has always had attractions for the craftsman who is master of his craft, and who sighs for fresh fields to conquer, knowing better than the outsider what are the difficulties which he has overcome successfully in any piece of work from the side of craftsmanship, though often with disastrous results when the matter is regarded from the point of view of excellence in design and purity of taste. It has been maintained by purists in modern times that all engraving or shading of the pieces of wood used in forming the design is illegitimate; and if this be so, it is equally illegitimate to stain any of them; but it is undeniable that a great addition to the resources of the inlayer was made by the discoveries of Fra Giovanni, and it seems unreasonable to refuse to make any use of them because later intarsiatori abused these means of gaining effect. The earliest work, it is true, depends mainly upon silhouette for its beauty, but does not altogether disdain lines within the main outline, and the abandonment of these inner lines, whether made by graver or saw, so reduces the possibilities of choice of subject as to restrict the designer to a simplicity which is apt to become bald. A great deal may be done by choice of pieces of wood and arrangement of the direction of the lines of the grain; some of Fra Giovanni's perspectives show very suggestive skies made in this manner, and Fra Damiano was very successful in thus suggesting the texture of much veined and coloured marble and of rocks, but directly the human figure enters into the design these expedients are felt to be insufficient and inexpressive, and inner lines have perforce to be introduced. The opposite extreme is such work as the panels by the brothers Caniana in the Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo, in which the composition and drawing of the figures recall the designs of the Caracci, and the technique of the shading reminds one of a copper plate, while the tinting and gradation of the colours take away all impression of a work in wood, substituting that of a coloured engraving. Here it is quite evident that the desire to imitate pictorial qualities has led the craftsman far away from what should have been his aim, viz., to display the qualities of the material which he was using to the best advantage, consistently with the position and purpose of his work in it. Not that perfection of workmanship is to be decried, though it is only occasionally that one is able to make use of, or indeed produce it. But the æsthetic sense demands that consideration for material and purpose in every production which the joy and pride of the craftsman in overcoming difficulties sometimes prevents him from giving. Notwithstanding the beauty of much of the marquetry of the periods of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., one often feels that design has been put to one side in the endeavour to gain a realistic effect, and the same defect may be traced more clearly in the clumsier Dutch and German productions. Even in the Italian work of an earlier date every now and then the same fault peeps out, though the excellent taste of the nation at that period prevented the Italians from falling into such excesses, and one generally feels the wood even in their most elaborate perspectives. It may be asserted in a general way that the more colours are used the less likelihood is there of the effect being quite satisfactory, and that any light and shade introduced should be of the simplest kind. A slight darkening of parts of the wood to gain a certain suggestion of roundness is quite admissible, but the expedient should be used with discretion, lavish employment of it leading to heaviness of effect and a monotony of tone which are most unpleasing. If ivory or metals are introduced the greatest care is necessary to prevent them from giving a spotty and uneven effect to the design, for neither these two materials nor mother-of-pearl marry quite with the tone of the wood; and this inequality is likely to increase with age, as the wood becomes richer and mellower in colour. Such materials should be so used that the points where they occur may form a pattern in themselves independently of the rest of the design, so that the effect may be pleasing at first sight, before the general meaning of the less prominent details is realised. Any other way of using them courts failure, since the effect of the whole design is ruined by the uncalculated prominence and inequality of these materials here and there. The Dutch sometimes made use of mother-of-pearl, in pieces upon which engraving broke up the hard glitter of the material, mingled with brass wire and nails or studs driven into the surface of the wood. The two materials appear to be quite harmonious, and small articles decorated in this manner are effective and satisfactory. The Italian use of ivory for the decoration of musical instruments, chess and backgammon boards, and other small objects is almost always successful, the proportion between wood and ivory being well judged, and the forms of the ornament pleasing.