And in general the bodies of trees, as of other living beings, have in them skin, blood, flesh, sinews, veins, bones and marrow.1
∵
In Book 16 of his Historia naturalis, Pliny the Elder foregrounds an almost anatomical approach to trees and the idea of a deep structural and physiological homology between the vegetable, animal and human worlds, whereby the body of the tree and of man/woman are essentially the same, linked through a bond of embodied design that can become manifest. This fundamental consonance is the guiding principle of Pliny’s extended discussion around the nature of vegetation, which is treated throughout the treatise as a living being, carrier of vital spirit or anima.2 This chapter builds on this analogical approach to take a fresh look at the Renaissance blossoming of wood inlay or intarsia, a technology involved in an animated conversation with nature through the medium of wood. I will explore intarsia through material mimesis, a concept that evokes processes of active correspondence. I will argue that intarsia reveals a deep affinity and interconnectedness between the human and non-human natural domains (fig. 2.1). With intarsia, art and nature intertwine, becoming indistinguishable (Ingold 2013, 91–108).
Giovanni da Verona, pheasant and liturgical objects, c.1502. Wood intarsia. Monte Oliveto Maggiore, choir, detail of intarsia panel
© Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Sergio Anelli / Bridgeman Images
1 Defining Material Mimesis
Coming to terms with mimesis, even just linguistically, is no simple task (Ajmar 2016). Although the term generally used in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy to refer to mimesis is imitazione, the Renaissance meaning of the word goes well beyond that of imitation, which for us today is mostly a derogatory notion, conjuring up concepts of mindless copying and tainted replication. Mimesis not only encompasses the pursuit of naturalism in art, but might even extend to endowing representational art with the power to transcend the empirical domain and open the door to ‘the spiritual substructure of reality’ (Halliwell 2002, 350). Renaissance imitazione is closer to the wider, far more fertile, ancient notion of mimesis (from the classical Greek
We can see this approach to mimesis underpinning Renaissance natural philosophical writings echoing Pliny’s, for example in Dell’ Historia Naturale, authored by the apothecary and collector Ferrante Imperato and first published in Naples in 1599. Written in the vernacular, richly illustrated and carrying an extensive index for easy consultation, the treatise showcases how pervasively mimesis occurs in nature. Dendrite stones – from
Stone naturally designed with images of woods, engraving from Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale, Venice, 1672 (1599)
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This Renaissance worldview, where nature is believed to operate through mimesis, is ably illustrated through the contemporary debate about fossils, which are frequently brought forward as eloquent exemplars of this phenomenon. Fossils are often explained not as the mineralised remains of living organisms, but as petrified juices generated by the earth’s natural ability to imitate living creatures, following an interpretive model based on mimetic principles.5 In a famous passage of his Musaeum Metallicum (completed by 1599 and published post-mortem in 1648), a friend of Imperato, the Bolognese natural philosopher and physician Ulisse Aldrovandi, aligns himself with this position. Responding to the presence within fossils of what appear like depictions of natural forms, he suggests that ‘we really must admire the wonderful spectacle of Nature, which traces these images so perfectly that they look as if they have been painted with a brush’.6 The Helix coquina, a fossil specimen featured in his collection, where, in Aldrovandi’s eyes, nature has recreated the appearance of a shell, provides a tangible example of the artistry of nature (Sarti 2003). This idea of nature as a maker of images is, however, complicated by an alternative outlook postulating instead processes of subterraneous metamorphosis, whereby living organisms mutate into fossilised forms over time under the influence of particular agents, such as underground moisture and fluids or ‘humours’. Imperato advocates for both understandings somehow working in unison. In his explanation of some ‘figurative or inscribed marbles’, he suggests that ‘their figuration is the result of earlier forms transformed through the intervention of the stone-like humour, so that what was earlier a batch of seeds or hay has been changed into stone over time’ (fig. 2.3).7 While apparently in disagreement with each other, both interpretative frameworks assume that nature’s transformative and generative powers can operate mimetically across different domains, allowing for something to reveal itself in or through something else.
Stone naturally carved with images of wheat, seeds and legumes, engraving from Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale, Venice 1672 (1599)
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
I propose to define material mimesis as a concept bringing together the notion of natural mimesis outlined above with a phenomenon that manifests itself within the many Renaissance arts engaged mimetically with nature and/or other arts, not just visually and at surface level, but also materially and technologically (Ajmar 2016). I want to suggest that material mimesis is an active component of wider processes of artisanal epistemology whereby approximating another material – natural or man-made – not only embodies an artistic and technological aspiration, but also an intention to connect human making with nature’s generative power at a deep level (Smith 2004, 2014). To make with nature: this lies at the heart of Renaissance views of nature as being in permanent transformation, and of matter as fundamentally animated.8 Between the late fourteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, a wide array of mimetic productions, including ceramics, glass, stucco, stone and wood, flourished on the Italian peninsula, sharing a common purpose: looking – and to some extent being – like something other than themselves. Exploiting the intrinsic animacy of the material, these artefacts defy comfortable and fixed systems of classification, as they embrace complexity, ambiguity and openness, and foreground the fluid, dynamic, alive nature of matter.
The practices at the heart of material mimesis somehow carry within themselves an ability to challenge the boundaries between the natural kingdoms, between the natural and the man-made, and between different artificial materials, through artefacts that often embody a status in between the solid and the liquid, a sort of mezza natura, as in the case of the ‘half mineral’.9 One of the most explicit cases of material mimesis bringing together art and nature is so-called vetro calcedonio or chalcedony glass, a fifteenth-century Venetian production capable of trans-materially taking on the appearance of a natural material, such as the semi-precious mineral agate (fig. 2.4).
Artist unknown, bottle, 1500–1525. Chalcedony glass, Venice
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Made by adding metal oxides to the glass formula, vetro calcedonio might be seen as a physical embodiment of the Renaissance understanding of materials, whereby glass is classified as a ‘half-mineral’ (mezzo minerale), by virtue of being a substance suspended between mineral and metal, fluid and solid, natural and man-made.10 The vigorous waves of glass that make up these artefacts are a powerful metaphor of the Aristotelian epistemological model whereby minerals are understood as juices solidified within the earth.11 Above all, they evoke a connected genesis and shared ontology between the semi-precious stone and the glass object – the result of a close collaboration between art and nature. In this chapter I will argue that these emergent mimetic technologies contributed significantly to expanding the boundaries of artisanal knowledge, while also providing the material evidence of that expanded know-how. As they encouraged the development of novel ways of understanding and re-producing materiality, they led to a fuller exploitation of the potential intrinsic within the material itself.
The in-between status of the mimetic arts might also be seen to extend to time and space. Suspended between different media and stretching the boundaries of contemporary technology, these artefacts might also be seen to oscillate between different temporal and geographical frameworks, evoking both recent and distant antiquities.
From ancient Greco-Roman to more recent non-European objects, mimetic artefacts often appear to engage in vertiginous processes of multiple quotation and reference across distant domains. Eloquent examples include the tin-glazed earthenware tazza, possibly made in Tuscany, shown in fig. 2.5, whose dark manganese spotted glaze resembles the chromatic effects of chalcedony, thus suggesting a response to late classical agate vessels such as the famous Tazza Farnese, held in the Medici collections since the fifteenth century.12 The tazza also connects Italian pottery to other materials, such as the natural shell of the tortoise, as well as to earlier ceramics such as Egyptian marbled ceramics (fifteenth century CE) or Chinese ‘tortoise-shell’ stoneware (twelfth to thirteenth century CE).13 The reverse, which appears to be a variation on the theme of the Buddhist double-lotus shape commonly found in Chinese ceramics, sculpture and lacquer, further amplifies the temporally and geographically multilayered nature of the object.
Artist unknown, tazza, 1580–1600. Earthenware with manganese and tin glaze intended to imitate tortoiseshell, Italy
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
I propose that one of the factors underlying the emergence of the mimetic arts in the Renaissance is the arrival or the surfacing on the Italian peninsula of non-European and Greco-Roman artefacts predicated on the appearance and innate properties of the material. Chinese ceramics, Indian tortoiseshell and Asian lacquer all belong to this wide category of objects, emphatically asserting their intrinsic materiality, and offering in some way an alternative system of value to the many painted artefacts that continued to develop over the course of the Renaissance – from polychrome sculpture to pictorial furniture. This non-European ware of substance reached European shores through multiple channels, often as diplomatic gifts or as prestigious trade goods, and is documented within Italian collections from the late Middle Ages onwards.14 At the same time, growing awareness of and contact with Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine artefacts – ranging from ancient agateware to alabaster vessels, from coloured marble sculpture to marbled ceramics – would have expanded the familiar material realm and helped to ignite interest in the intrinsic material qualities of objects.15 Both phenomena must be seen as playing a central role in the development in Italy of indigenous mimetic arts at this time.
The mimetic arts have been marginalised from the art-theoretical narrative because of the predominance of a discourse foregrounding disegno as the principle and foundation of art. The definition of disegno as a process pertaining to figurative representation, and therefore not central to arts predicated essentially on materiality, has contributed to this relegation of the mimetic arts. The concept of material mimesis helps establish a more balanced perspective, bringing into the foreground the many Renaissance non-figurative – or non-exclusively figurative – artistic practices where a more holistic, beneath-the-surface idea of imitation predicated on material and technological interconnectedness is pursued. Though it should be seen in a continuum with visual mimesis – as for example in painting’s long-standing attempt to represent and replicate materials such as marble through abstract pictorial effects – it will be suggested that what distinguishes material mimesis is the ability to also engage with the deep, physical and almost visceral material nature of the medium in question, and thus with its ontology. Where likeness is not achieved merely through figurative mimesis, but through practices more closely involved in interrogating, reproducing and revealing the genesis and nature of the material. These practices serve to make explicit the complexity of the making processes: the places where design becomes embodied. To explore these questions in greater depth, I will now turn to wood inlay or intarsia, a technology that over the course of the Renaissance developed a distinctive new vocabulary of material mimesis.
2 Material Mimesis in Wood Intarsia
Intarsia provides a fertile ground for exploring the way in which material mimesis participated in Renaissance artisanal practices of material exploration and knowledge making. A productive starting point for investigating how is Renaissance intarsia understood at the time as an artistic practice and process involving embodied design consists in looking at the language used to describe it. Two different standpoints emerge clearly: that of the humanist scholar encountering this new technology and that of the artisan making it. The metaphors employed by these two groups operate on a wide semantic spectrum. Some humanist scholars use ‘painting in wood’ (legno pinger), to refer to this technique, highlighting its ability to make an image out of wood. Some artisans articulate intarsia-making in a more physical and exploratory way, such as ‘extracting with the chisel’, which can also be interpreted as ‘scrutinising’, the wooden matter.16 Here we can see both an understanding of intarsia as a visual practice brought forward in partnership with the material, and an approach suggesting a more embodied sequence of actions that entailed carving out the material first and then examining it closely, almost anatomically, in order to achieve the desired effect. Although different, these practices and ways of seeing converge in the creation of intarsia work, where image and matter are intimately connected and where mimesis affects both the surface and the depth of matter.
The view of intarsia as predominantly a visual technique involving wood emerges in an early account of the impression it made upon a fifteenth century beholder. This compelling ekphrasis was written by the Sicilian monk Mattheus Colatius in response to his encounter with a recently completed cycle in the sacrestia of the Paduan church of St. Antonio in around 1475:17
It all looks true. I cannot believe that these [panels] are a fiction. I get closer and slide my hand across all of them. Then I step back, and slowly walk around, looking in depth into each of them. […] I see various buildings: houses, bell towers, churches, […] steps, arches, windows, with projected shadows, doors left ajar, revealing inner spaces.18
The detailed description, panel by panel, fulfils the topoi of the genre, as Colatius marvels not just at the visual accomplishment brought about by the panels, but also at the mimetic power of the thin slivers of wood making up the inlays, inherently depicting a figure, an object or a scene, and displaying an in-depth knowledge of nature. Significantly, the emphasis on the visual power of intarsia is combined with a material eulogy of this technology: what emerges is not just an optical response to the mimetic qualities of wood inlay, and a need to look into it (intuens, from intueor, means to examine intently, and suggests close observation), but also a haptic one, where he explores it dynamically by walking in close proximity to it and sliding a hand over it. Perception by touch and physical engagement are equally important cognitive tools, pointing towards an enhanced process of material, embodied knowing. In his closing words, Colatius remarks: ‘What can scarcely be painted in colours, you have painted in wood’ – ligno pinxistis – acknowledging intarsia as a fully animated manifestation of material mimesis.19
Intarsia reached Italy mostly via Northern Africa and Andalusia, where its largely non-figurative character, generally attuned to Islamic principles of representation, allowed for the power of the material to manifest itself (Wilmering 1999, 65–68). As it arrived on Italian shores, intarsia acquired a distinctly figurative idiom. It continued, however, to carry an emphasis on materiality as well, eventually leading to a distinctively new language of inlay, where wood is deployed as an art material capable of exposing its own animate nature while also re-presenting mimetically other substances. We see this enacted in the mimetic intarsia panel by Giovanni da Verona (fig. 2.1), where the wood tesserae display wood’s anatomy – the ‘skin, blood, flesh, sinews, veins, bones and marrow’, to use Pliny’s phrase, that make it alive as a material – in different parts of the composition, from the dado squares and the building blocks of the fictional arch to the areas where the wood imitates different media, from marble to gold, linen to feathers.
This emphasis on the materiality of wood and its expressive power is a useful point of departure for suggesting that, between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, intarsia developed a distinctively new wood-based lexicon. Intarsia makers contributed to this phenomenon by moving gradually away from the drawn, graphic intarsia of the earlier period and embracing instead a materially generated form of inlay.
If we place Matteo di Nanni’s Justice panel (c.1430) (fig. 2.6) side by side with the figure of St. Jerome (fig. 2.7) by Cristoforo Canozi (c.1471), we see a significant shift in the way in which the materiality of form is expressed. When comparing the locks of hair of the figure of Justice with St. Jerome’s strands of beard, we notice that while the former is obtained by inserting thin slivers of wood next to each other to create an almost graphic impact, the latter is achieved by identifying a wood fragment which already contains within itself the desired structure and visual effect and placing it in the right position within the wooden mosaic. This involves selecting a fragment that does not just depict, but materially embodies the parallel strands of a well-groomed beard, where the design is intrinsic to the material, as opposed to imposed on, or drawn over, it, and thus where artisan and nature operate as co-workers.
Matteo di Nanni, Justice, c.1430. Wood intarsia, Siena
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Cristoforo Canozi, St. Jerome, c.1471. Wood intarsia, Modena, Duomo, choir, detail of intarsia panel
© Ghigo Roli / Bridgeman Images
3 Designing in Wood
With intarsia, designing can occur in rather than on the material and often involves extracting an image rather than applying it. For this reason, intarsia lends itself well to the notion of embodied design, whereas disegno is something intrinsic to making and to the materiality of the artefact as opposed to something imposed over it, a process of continuous correspondence between maker, material and environment.20 From the discerning selection of materials to the ingenious composition of the wood tesserae, where the shape, colour and figuration, texture and luminosity of the individual wooden piece are put in a material relationship with the rest of the ensemble in the physical making of the intarsia panel, all aspects of this technology are designed in. The design process involved in making intarsia is highly distinctive, though it often involves design as drawing in the conventional sense too. Some design drawings made by intarsia makers have survived, and documentary sources have occasionally captured their authorship of sketches and preparatory drawings.21 Moreover, panels that survive in a damaged state often reveal the rigorous armature of perspectival drawing incisions that preceded the application of the wooden tesserae (fig. 2.8) – most likely executed with the help of a design drawing or cartoon applied to the matrix, with the design being destroyed in the process of transposing the image.22 However, this emphasis on design drawings and their translation onto the intarsia panels is quite misleading, as it fails to capture the fact that intarsia design is a much more intrinsic and materially engaged activity than drawing on paper. Intarsia design goes beyond the surface, as it cuts through and into the flesh and bone of wood, enacting Pliny’s paradigm for understanding wood as a complex, multilayered body.
Cristoforo and Bernardino Canozi, damaged sacristy panel showing design marks, c.1487–1490. Wood intarsia, Parma, Duomo, sacristy, detail of intarsia panel
© Marta Ajmar
This dissecting process, bringing intarsia close to another arte engaged with the depth of matter, anatomy, is achieved with the help of a tool unique to this technology: the shoulder knife (scarpello a tiro).23 Intarsia makers are aware of the distinctive, precise and laborious physicality of this process and of the specific role of this tool, as vocally stated in an intarsia panel by the Sienese master Antonio Barili (fig. 2.9). Architect, engineer, sculptor in wood as well as intarsia maker, Barili operated within humanistic circles and was a close friend of the architect and theorist Francesco di Giorgio Martini.24 The panel, now lost, was once part of an intarsia cycle made by Barili between 1483 and 1504 for the chapel of St. John the Baptist in the Duomo of Siena.25 A highly self-reflexive self-portrait, it represents Antonio in the act of incising with a shoulder knife an inscription on a plaque that simultaneously proclaims his authorship of the artwork and underlines its arduous physicality. The inscription reads ‘HOC EGO ANTONIVS BARILIS OPVS COELO NON PENICELLO EXCVSSI AN DN MCCCCCII’, ‘I, Antonio Barili, have extracted this work with the knife/chisel, not the little brush, AD 1502’. Celebrating an energetic relationship with matter and the role of wood inlay’s most distinctive tool, the panel sets a paragone between intarsia and painting possibly intended also as a sexual innuendo, where the sizeable ingenuity of the shoulder knife – coelum is both ‘chisel’ and ‘vault of the sky’ – is set against the limpness of the small brush – penicellum/penicillum meaning both ‘little brush’ and ‘little penis’.26 It is certainly not accidental that the shoulder knife gets pride of place in several contemporary intarsia panels, as it is the technological pièce de résistance in the arsenal of the intarsia maker, manifesting the uniqueness of his skill in its engagement with wood as a material substance to be cut into, where the design is carefully excavated from the material, rather than imposed over it. The body of the artisan is central to this process of close and continuous correspondence with the material, and the resulting intarsia an example of embodied design manifesting a process of working with nature.
Antonio Barili, self-portrait, 1502. Wood intarsia, originally in Siena, Duomo, Chapel of St. John the Baptist, later held in the Staatliches Kunstgewerbemuseum, Vienna, lost in World War II
© Marta Ajmar (photo in author’s possession)
4 Embodied Knowing through Reconstruction
To gain a deeper understanding of the process of designing-in, and the language of embodied wood design, I recently engaged in the first stages of reconstruction of a late fifteenth-century Italian wood intarsia, under the guidance of a distinguished cabinet-maker and furniture conservator based in Florence, Simone Chiarugi.
The intarsia panel selected for the reconstruction is part of the backrest of a choir stall and survives in situ in the Duomo at Parma, Northern Italy (figs. 2.10, 2.11).27 Designed and executed by Cristoforo and Bernardino Canozi between 1487 and 1490, the cycle stands out for the way in which the materiality and inner design of the wood are exploited to create an ensemble of extraordinary naturalism. The panel (fig. 2.11), which we chose because of its relative simplicity of design that lends itself well to a partial reconstruction, represents an alcove with open doors revealing a cavity occupied by a footed vessel filled with candles. The design uses at least four different woods: bog oak (quercia affogata) for the near-black background; red cherry (ciliegio) for the outer frame and the vessel; curly maple (acero riccio) for the blonde, wavy parts of the closet doors; and oak (quercia) for the dark brown components of the door.
Cristoforo and Bernardino Canozi, Banco dei celebranti, 1487–1490. Wood intarsia, Parma, Duomo
© Marta Ajmar
Cristoforo and Bernardino Canozi, Footed vessel filled with candles, 1487–1490. Banco dei celebranti, detail of intarsia panel. Wood intarsia, Parma, Duomo, choir
© Marta Ajmar
As an improvised intarsia apprentice only beginning to engage with chaîne opératoire methodologies, I became involved in the process of partially reconstructing this composition in the full awareness that many of the methods and tools employed were inaccurate, anachronistic and significantly distant from those that would have been utilised in a Renaissance workshop (figs. 2.12, 2.13).28 The drawing has been extracted from a photograph of the intarsia panel and transferred directly onto the wooden support to guide the reconstruction (fig. 2.14). From lacking historical tools, such as the shoulder knife, to the use of electric saws and planes, I embarked upon this undertaking conscious that authenticity was not the objective. I would argue, however, that even this process of flagrant historical approximation is valuable when it comes to attempting to capture salient aspects of bodily engagement with materials, tools and the unfolding of design. For example, the selection, cutting and planing down of the different woods to make the thin intarsia tesserae brought me into very close contact with the physical properties of each wood. Though the term tessera is useful because of its immediate association with mosaic, the intarsia technique is significantly different. While in mosaic the individual tessera is a largely standardised unit, within intarsia each wooden piece must be cut with the utmost precision to fit together perfectly through shape and coloration within a specific location. In this way, each wooden tile embodies a different part of the design (fig. 2.14).
Simone Chiarugi in his laboratory sawing a plank of wood
© Marta Ajmar
My workstation and tools in Simone Chiarugi’s laboratory
© Marta Ajmar
Reconstructing the alcove door with cherry and curly maple wood tesserae
© Marta Ajmar
In other words, unlike in a mosaic, my reconstructive efforts have not involved assembling regular fragments of wood to fill in a predetermined composition, but rather generating the design from within the depth of the selected pieces and cutting them in such a way as to maintain the integrity of each part. Once cut to measure, each fragment is then assembled on the wooden support, gradually making the design. Because the design is extracted from within the wood, however, choosing the right type and piece of wood is of vital significance. In a similar way the Renaissance intarsia maker, while often using a pre-existing design drawing, would have played a key role in identifying the inner figuration, the image within the wood that best approximated the intended design. The significance of this process of intimate material engagement is highlighted by evidence suggesting that the Canozi brothers travelled to the various locations where they had been commissioned to make intarsia cycles on their own cart laden with wooden fragments, including woods that would have easily been sourced in any given location (Bagatin 1990).
As I learnt to cut the piece at the correct ‘anatomical’ angle to expose a particular facies or coloration of the wood, so I also began to look into it. Selecting the pieces of wood with the right texture, and with patterns of light and shade able to let the design emerge from within, created a new visual, haptic and olfactory proximity with the material, allowing me to develop a more embodied understanding of and empathy with the wood. Finding my way around fragments of oak heavily infested with woodworm (fig. 2.15), ideally suited to design-in part of the intarsia alcove because their state of relative decay has produced a darker hue in the wood, made me think anew about these parasites, no longer freeloaders but in some way co-workers, thus opening a window into the biological and environmental circumstances in which wood grows and decays, where its life cycle is embodied and traceable in the material.
Oak wood fragment infested with woodworm
© Marta Ajmar
A significant part of my panel reconstruction involved manipulating acero riccio or curly maple, a blonde wood widely utilised by Renaissance intarsia makers for its embodied image potential, emerging from the depth of the material through a pattern of almost parallel, gently oscillating, lustrous waves. Curly maple was often used within intarsia to imitate materials embodying these luminous, vibrating visual qualities, such as silk, marble and reed. Its visual softness and aliveness disguise, however, a surprising hardness and brittleness. The ‘resistance of material and technique’ eloquently described by Juhani Pallasmaa in The thinking hand (2009, chap. 2) manifested themselves to me clearly, through the wood’s recalcitrance to my hand’s clumsy attempts to manipulate it.
As I worked my way through the sawing and chiseling of the curly maple door, my lack of skill made itself manifest in multiple ways. Soon my untrained hand began to leave permanent, irreversible scars on the panel (fig. 2.16). As the wooden door started to break in several places because of the flawed and unsustainable pressure I involuntarily applied to it in the cutting process, I came to recognise the extent to which embodied ways on knowing demand a continuous process of correspondence. Antonio Barili’s boastful statement proclaiming that he had extracted the work with the chisel, not the brush, while holding a vigorous shoulder knife and carrying out extremely fine work made me painfully aware of my lack of proficiency. As I recollected Pliny’s analogy between the anatomy of a man and that of a tree, I identified as a surgeon botching up her incision and started to experience new levels of anxiety and a sudden urge to flee … It’s a long road to embodied ways of knowing.
Reconstruction of curly maple wood door showing various points of fracture
© Marta Ajmar
5 Looking into Wood: Renaissance Intarsia Makers as Material Knowers
Between the late fifteenth- and the early sixteenth-century, the technology of intarsia produced a new ability to look at its material with fresh eyes and see into it. Designing-in wood went hand in hand with a new way of looking into this material. Renaissance intarsia embraced wood’s materiality to new creative effects, revealing an epistemological approach where making and material knowledge are in symbiosis. This novel material outlook fostered the deployment of wood that would have normally been rejected in the production process of furniture: whose irregularities, abnormalities or undesirable structure, due to a variety of factors – from parasites to unusual patterns of growth or cutting and carving processes – would usually have led the piece to be discarded. Instead, what we see at play is a skill known to sixteenth-century natural philosophers as discernment (discernimento), whereby the intarsia master understood the material at a deeper level, and developed a distinctive ability for sourcing, selecting, preparing and applying the very particular wood fragments demanded in each design.29 Through the possession of such skills, the intarsia master revealed himself as an active knower and manipulator of matter, fruitfully engaged in material mimesis.
One of the strategies adopted by intarsia makers for designing in and engaging mimetically with materials involved exploiting the peculiar variations in colour and texture of the wood itself. Some woods lent themselves to this particularly well. Walnut or noce, a wood displaying a great variety of veins, flesh and bones, especially within its roots, became a material of choice for many intarsia makers (Wilmering 1999, 9). Echoing Alberti, agronomic treatises remark how walnut wood contained naturally generated images of ‘mountains, houses, villages, heads of men, animals […] and other similar things pleasing to the eye’.30 This potential is exploited in the panel shown in fig. 2.17, portraying the studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino. Here, the variation in luminosity between the sapwood and the outer parts of the wood in walnut is utilised trans-materially to evoke the armour’s individual metal components’ propensity to reflect light differently. The sharpness of the helmet, the roundness of the gauntlet, the intricate pattern of the knitted chain mail under the armour and even the broken surface texture of leather straps are conjured up in wood.
Attributed to Baccio Pontelli, ducal armour, 1470s. Wood intarsia, Urbino, Palazzo Ducale, Studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro, detail of intarsia panel
© Bridgeman Images
Intarsia makers’ strategic use of woods implies a direct engagement with wood’s materiality and biology, where the conventionally perceived weakness of particular aspects of the tree’s anatomy and physiology is turned into an expressive mimetic tool. These irregular features in wood – what Pliny refers to as a ‘fault of timber […] called cross-grain, when the veins and knots have grown twisted’ – can be put to work. As Pliny remarks ‘in some trees are found centres like those of marble, that is hard pieces like a nail, unkind to the saw’, but that material hardness can be exploited to evoke an affinity across natural domains between wood and stone.31 Giovanni da Verona’s intarsia cycle at Monteoliveto (fig. 2.1) makes active use of these parts of the wood carrying marble-like patterns, obtained from the branches of climbing plants or from the roots of trees: these wooden pieces are used purposefully in parts of the composition where we would expect to find variegated marble. They feature prominently in the dado panels of the lower register of Giovanni’s composition, where architectural conventions would have dictated the use of coloured and veined marble. While fulfilling the rules of architectural decorum, these components, where the wood somehow transcends itself, affirming a deep bond between the vegetable and the mineral domains, are also powerful agents of material mimesis, ultimately proclaiming that these materials are deeply connected.
This mimetic correspondence across natural domains is further explored in a new way of imitating trans-materially, or rather ‘counterfeiting’ other materials, which emerges in intarsia from the early sixteenth century: what is known today as legno composito or ‘composite wood’, a man-made wood that might be seen as an ancestor of particle board or chipboard. Resulting from the waste (brucioli, literally ‘crumbs’) of woodcarving, composito is made by assembling and gluing together different kinds of wood shavings, some artificially coloured, to make a compact cake that is later sliced into tesserae, producing new composite effects resembling other materials, such as variegated marble. This novel invention was widely used by intarsia makers, possibly starting with Antonio Barili, who gives it pride of place in his intarsia self-portrait (fig. 2.9), where composito lines almost the entirety of the inner walls of the fictional window (Wilmering 1999, 22). This use of composito would continue to appear in many architectural details where a marble incrustation would be expected (fig. 2.18).
Antonio Barili, self-portrait, 1502. Wood intarsia, originally in Siena, Duomo, chapel of St. John the Baptist, later held in the Staatliches Kunstgewerbemuseum, Vienna, lost in World War II. Detail of intarsia panel with composito
© Marta Ajmar (photo in author’s possession)
Imitating variegated marble not just visually – at surface-level – composito also aims to approximate it structurally, in its heterogenous composition, making apparent veins, speckles and different kinds of grains. What is enacted is a process of material mimesis, where this wood-substitute is used to embody a different material structurally, revealing its inner makeup. We can discern in it tiny chips of different thickness, colour and reflectivity, and their layered structure, leading the eye into the depth of this material, and by implication opening questions about its composition and origin. With mimetic intarsia we see in action the artisan’s ability both to reveal the processes of natural transformation in new and unexpected ways, and to reinvent matter through ingenuity, where human creative power operates in conjunction with the vis generativa, the generative force of nature (Morel 1998).
When we look at the attributes assigned to many intarsia makers in their contracts, disseminated through Italian archives, an interesting pattern emerges: they appear under a range of different titles. The expression magistri perspective, masters of perspective, is often found, in line with the contemporary classification of some intarsia panels as perspectives (prospettive) on the strength of their spatial, geometrical framework. It is also common, however, to find attributes that foreground an identity bound to the materials and technological processes involved, where they appear as manipulators of wood: they are listed as magistri a lignamine, masters of wood; incisores lignaminis, wood-cutters or surgeons; maestri intagliaduri, woodcarvers or engravers; and maestri intarsiadori, intarsia masters, the last term suggesting a considerable level of independence and self-assurance within this arte, which is named as such (Bagatin 1990, 204).
This overt engagement, even at the level of trade taxonomies, with the physical processes of intarsia making, leads us to propose an approach that would see it as a distinctive form of artisanal epistemology, combining visual and material knowledge in unique ways. Much scholarly attention has been paid to intarsia as perspective.32 It is undeniably striking how deeply this technology embraced the pictorial and geometrical opportunities and challenges offered by an engagement with prospettiva and its corollary effects of illusion and lifelikeness. Through perspective, wood could aspire to a figurative imitation of nature. The precision in the replication of reality, and the ability to generate accurate geometric designs brought about by the practice of perspective in art, must be singled out as having a significant effect on all the mimetic arts in the drive for close surface approximation. The intimate engagement with the ‘surface characteristics of the phenomenal world as they are optically transmitted point by point into the human eye by the reflected ambient light array’ engendered by perspective would also have helped to instigate curiosity about the physical structure of the natural world, and prompt an investigation into matter beneath the surface (Edgerton 1991, 10). After all, perspectiva – from the Latin perspicere – means ‘to look deeply into’.33 However, the radical conceptual, perceptual and epistemological transformation brought about by perspective, with its heightened visual sensitivity and inquisitive outlook, did not operate in isolation. As we saw with intarsia, it went hand in hand with artisans’ new emphasis on material mimesis, and together they gave rise to new visually and materially driven artistic productions predicated on exploring and revealing the inner structure of things.
6 Revealing the Inner Workings of Things
‘[I have not written] anything that I have not seen with my eyes, and touched with my hands, and that I have not explored anatomically, both in its exterior and interior parts’.34 Aldrovandi’s declaration in his Discorso Naturale (1565) of how his anatomical knowledge of nature was acquired through direct surface and in-depth visual and haptic investigation summarises an approach shared across different artisanal productions, as this chapter has explored in the case of intarsia. This quasi-anatomical approach to material production developed over the course of the Renaissance, bringing artisanal practices closer to an outlook generally associated with natural philosophy and medicine. From the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, a new interest in revealing the inner workings of things emerged in different domains of learning. This phenomenon has been associated with the rise of pictorial perspective, and more generally with technological and scientific attitudes that manifest themselves, for example, in new visual approaches offering peeled-off and transparent views as well as cross-sections. We see this concern appearing in manuscript and printed treatises ranging from engineering, architecture and pottery to human anatomy (Long 2011, chap. 2). In the peeled-off view of the skull shown in fig. 2.19, for example, the anatomist Andreas Vesalius represents the different layers making up the human head, revealing a complex structure involving skin, flesh, sinews, veins and bones.
Peeled-off view of human skull. Engraving from Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basel, 1543)
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This scrutiny into the inner mechanisms of things has been highlighted as a momentous pan-European phenomenon, underpinning wider processes of ‘rational’ knowledge construction, communication and exchange to which many early modern artisanal practices contributed (Long 2011, chap. 2). In the Italian sixteenth-century pottery manuscript shown in fig. 2.20, a diagram and transparent view of a new vessel design are offered to show how the water would fill it from below, through a hidden mechanism embedded in the deep structure of the ewer (fig. 2.20).
Cipriano Piccolpasso, transparent view of an ewer, Li Tre Libri dell’Arte del Vasaio, c.1557, fol. 15. Illustrated manuscript
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
This novel approach, proposing a distinctive way of understanding an object or a material by looking into and through it, brings us back to Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’ Historia Naturale. The treatise foregrounds an encyclopaedic engagement with all kinds of materials, from the fossil earths discussed above to non-European novelties such as Chinese porcelain. In an extended section devoted to earth-based productions, Imperato offers a significant mention of Chinese porcelain that expands on this materially focused looking into approach, where the inner structure and deep materiality of artefacts are closely examined:
brought to us from the Levant […] they are made of matter like no other, white, hard and subtle: so that when they are placed between the eye and the light, they can be seen in some degree of transparency.35
In later pages, Imperato goes beyond the surface of porcelain and interrogates it structurally. His discerning eye dissects porcelain almost anatomically, emphasising the layers of glazes and pigments and the underlying body of the pot, pointing to an understanding of artefacts through their intrinsic, below-the-surface, deep materiality:
the excellence of porcelain resides as much in the body as in the glaze. In them, the whiteness of the one [body] is so similar to the whiteness of the other [glaze] that those who are not familiar with this matter think that they are looking at one substance alone.36
Thus, artefacts and materials are seen to participate in the broader phenomenon discussed above of apprehending things below the surface, interrogating their materiality in terms of substance, structure, stratification and depth, where the eye is not only looking at, but looking into. This approach, merging an external and internal, optical and haptic scrutiny, may be seen as the first step in wider processes of material knowing.
7 Conclusion
In this chapter I have sought to define material mimesis as a form of artistic and technological imitation able to reveal deep correspondences connecting the human and natural domains, and fostering ways of making with nature. I have showed how this largely non-figurative, beneath-the-surface understanding of imitation helped Renaissance artistic productions new to Europe make manifest the design embodied within the material, showing the continuity between the generative power of art and of nature and promoting artisan and nature as co-workers. Locating the discussion in the context of wood intarsia, a technology that tends to be side-lined by conventional accounts of Renaissance art, it is suggested that intarsia makers should be seen as discerning material knowers. After engaging in partial reconstruction to develop a more embodied understanding of this technology, I propose that intarsia makers display a distinctive ability and willingness to look into the depth of the wooden matter. This engagement with the inner workings of things aligns their approach with that of other contexts of Renaissance knowledge production – from anatomy to natural philosophy to pottery – ultimately reclaiming a more central place for intarsia makers within the wider techno-artistic ecosystem of the time.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Emma Spary and Marjolijn Bol for inviting me to present at the ‘Matter of mimesis’ conference and for their generous and inspiring feedback as editors. This chapter stems from research carried out for my forthcoming monograph exploring material mimesis in Italian Renaissance artefacts by examining cross-culturally practices of material imitation and reinvention and the role of artisans as material knowers. I am greatly indebted to the Leverhulme Trust for the Research Fellowship ‘Material mimesis: Local and global connections in the arts of the Italian Renaissance’, which enabled me to undertake extended research in Italy, Japan, China and Taiwan. I am also very thankful for the support offered by the V&A Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I would like to thank Simone Chiarugi for giving me the opportunity to engage in intarsia reconstruction under his expert guidance. The time spent in his workshop in Florence has been a truly transformative learning experience. Warmest thanks to the friends who have shared ideas and offered very valuable comments and suggestions, in particular Richard Checketts, Christine Göttler, Christine Guth, Alex Marr, Liz Miller, Ulinka Rublack, Pamela Smith, Paul Taylor and Simona Valeriani.
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Endnotes
Pliny 1945, vol. 4, 504: ‘Atque in totum corpori arborum ut reliquorum animalium cutis, sanguis, caro, nervi, venae, ossa, medullae.’ For other classical and medieval references revealing an understanding of wood as operating like a body, see Neilson 2014, 225–226.
Pliny 1945, vol. 4, 2: ‘Restat ut – neque ipsa anima carentia, quandoquidem nihil sine ea vivit – terra edita aut inde eruta dicantur ac nullum sileatur rerum naturae opus’. ‘It remains to describe the things produced by the earth or dug up from it – these also not being devoid of vital spirit, since nothing lives without it – and not to pass over in silence any of the works of nature’.
Halliwell 2002, 13–16 and 344–357; Findlen 1990, 292–331; see also Gebauer & Wulf 1995, 64–75.
Alberti 1540, 52: ‘Ipsam denique naturam pingendo delectari manifestum est. Videmus enim naturam, ut saepe in marmoribus Hippocentauros regumque barbatas facies effigiet’. For the translation, see Grayson 1972, 64–65.
An extensive account of the Renaissance debate on diagenesis, morphogenesis and natural generation can be found in Morel 1998.
Aldrovandi 1648, 101: ‘Verum debemus admirari pulchrum naturae ludentis in his lapidibus spectaculum, dum in his variorum animantium icones adeo accurate effigiat, ut penicillo delineare esse videantur’.
Imperato 1599, 603 [with regard to marmi lineati or scritti]: ‘i suoi figuramenti sono da forme vere precedenti già trasmutate dalla humorosità petrigna sopravenuta percioche il precedente cumolo de semi, e pagliuole nel successo di tempo si è trasmutato in pietra’.
Findlen 1990; Smith 2014; Klein & Spary 2009.
Biringuccio 1559, 98–103.
Biringuccio 1559, 98–103.
Aristotle, Metereologica, I: 111, 6.
Ajmar 2016; Fusco & Corti 2006.
Ajmar 2016.
Jackson & Jaffer 2004; Spallanzani 1994, 2006; Ajmar & Molà 2011; Gerritsen & Riello 2016; Juneja & Grasskamp 2018.
Christian 2010; Favaretto 1988; Fusco & Corti 2006.
The verb used is excutere, from excutio, suggesting an action of extraction combined with a process of examination.
The inlay still survives, in part, after extensive work and a catastrophic nineteenth-century restoration. See Bagatin 1990.
Colatius 1486, fols. 328v–329v: ‘Videntur illa mihi vera omnia. Non possum cito credere ficta esse. Accedo propius, duco per omnia manum. Regressus deinde circueo gradatim intuens diligentissime singula. […] Aedes, templa, cum campanis turres, fornicum fenestrarumque umbris, testudinis, surgentibus item gradibus cum etiam inclinatis foribus vacua videri.’ See Manni 71–72.
Colatius 1486, fol. 330v: ‘quo vix pingi colore potest, vos ligno pinxistis’.
Ingold 2002, part III.
See for example Bagatin 1990, 190.
See for example Manni 2002, 402.
See Wilmering 1999, 57; I would like to thank Lydia Goodson for making me aware of the use of the term ‘scarpello a tiro’ in Renaissance Umbria.
For a biography of Antonio Barili, see Lenzini Moriondo 1964.
The group, which originally included nineteen panels, was dismantled in 1663 and transferred in 1749 to the Coro of the Collegiata dei Santi Quirico e Giulitta in San Quirico d’Orcia, near Siena, where seven panels still survive. The panel discussed here was removed from the Collegiata to be sold to the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna and later lost during World War II. See Lenzini Moriondo 1964.
Diminutive of the Latin word penis, meaning tail, brush and penis.
For this Canozi cycle, see Bagatin 1990 and Manni 2002.
For an overview of re-enactment methodologies, see Agnew, Lamb & Tomann 2019. For an explanation of how embodied reconstruction can be used to gain insights into past cultures, see Tiballi 2008. A useful introduction to chaîne opératoire is provided by Coupaye 2015. See Marchand 2010 for knowledge creation and apprenticeship.
Dupré & Göttler 2017, 15–27. Imperato (1599) speaks of ‘discernimento’.
Tanara 1661, 514: ‘Monti, Case, Paesi, Capi d’Huomini, Animali, […] e simili di vista dilettevole’.
Pliny 1945, vol. 4, 516: ‘publicum omnium vitium vocant spiras, ubi convolvere se venae atque nodi. Inveniuntur in quibusdam sicut in marmore centra, id est duritia clavo similis, inimica serris’.
See, for example, Manni 2002.
Edgerton 1991, 43, 115 and 117–139.
Aldrovandi 1565, fol. 1565, fols. 39–42: ‘non iscrivendo cosa alcuna che co’ proprij occhi io non habbi veduto, et con le mani mie toccato, et fattone l’Anatomia, così delle parti esteriori, come interiori’. See also Tugnoli Pattaro, 1977.
Imperato 1599, 30: ‘Portate dal Levante […] sono fatte di materia diversa da ogni altra, bianca, dura e sottile: cosicché quando sono poste tra l’occhio e la luce si possono vedere in qualche misura di trasparenza’.
Imperato 1599, 30: ‘L’eccellenza della porcellana risiede sia nel corpo che nello smalto. In essa il bianco dell’uno è cosí simile al bianco dell’atra che coloro che non conoscono bene questo materiale credono di vedere una sola sostanza’.