MARQUETRY DEFINED

The word marquetry, derived from the French word marqueterie, refers to a group of artistic techniques whereby designs are cut from larger pieces of veneer with a jeweler's saw, along rectilinear or curvilinear patterns and then applied onto, or inlayed into a wood substrate. The wood substrate may range from flooring to wall panels to furnishings. Marquetry techniques are complex and diverse, but offer great decorative possibilities. Only the art of marquetry allows the marqueter to paint near picture-perfect designs in the wood medium.

Marquetry designs traditionally incorporate either elements of nature or scenes from nature, but practically any motif the imagination can conceive is possible. Marquetry designs may also incorporate various materials to create the desired, picture-like affect. While the most commonly used materials are color-contrasting woods, materials such as metals, tortoise shell, ivory, horn, mother of pearl, and stone, may also be used. Generally, the veneers used in a design are usually between 1mm to 2mm in thickness, regardless of its type.

MARQUETRY TECHNIQUES

There are five basic techniques for cutting marquetry designs:

• Tarsia certocina describes a technique in which cavities are cut out of a wood substrate with chisel and gouge and then filled with the design material(s). This process is often referred to as inlaying.
  
  
• Tarzia geometrica is a decoration utilizing rectilinear geometric shapes.
  
  
• Tarzia a tappo, or block marquetry, is used to create decorative banding for border fillets on furniture and floorings.
  
  
• Tarzia a incastro, or the Boulle technique, was developed in the early 17th century. In the latter half of the 17th century, this process was brought to new heights never before seen by Andre Charles Boulle in the workshops of Louis XIV. It is a process of cutting veneer that follows these steps: A stack of contrasting veneers are sandwiched between two "counter-veneers," or disposable veneers. (The top counter-veneer holds the trace of the design, and the complete assembly is referred to as a "packet.") The components of the design are cut out using a chevalet, after which the counter-veneers are discarded and the contrasting veneers are transposed to affect a design. (For example, suppose that two contrasting veneers such as ebony and ivory are used. The packet is cut at once, simultaneously cutting both the ebony and ivory to the exact same design specifications. Imagine those specifications to be simply a circle within a square. After the counter-veneers are discarded, the contrasting veneers may now be separated and transposed to reveal ivory circle within ebony square and vice versa).

The "piece-by-piece," or classical technique, is the most difficult of the techniques to execute. Unlike in the Boulle method, in the piece-by-piece technique the various elements of the design are cut separately in order to minimize the gap left by the saw blade. (Like the Boulle method, however, this technique still offers the marqueter the ability to produce many pieces of the same design element in one cutting.) Masterful skill is required to cut just the inside half of the design trace line for the background and just the outside half of this line for the foreground portion of the design. By doing this, however, the separate pieces of the design fit tightly together, effectively eliminating any gaps left by the saw blade.

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