In an intarsia, or wood inlay, panel from the sacristy in the Florence Duomo, a book’s pages are delineated by the wood grain, a conceptual synthesis of the artist’s materials and the materials from which paper is made. In another intarsia panel from the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, woodworm traces adorn the surface of a globe, suggesting not only geographic features but also the changeability of earthly matter. And in a panel from the Siena Cathedral, a saint’s robes are inflected with a green-staining fungus that illuminates the wood from within. These intriguing details indicate that Italian intarsia makers, who assembled thousands of pieces of wood to create illusionistic landscapes, still lifes, and religious figures, were doing more than implementing designs in wood. They were designing not only in wood, but from wood, intimately engaged with the woodland environment and thinking about how the life cycle of trees worked in concert with philosophical and spiritual concerns. 

My project has examined how Italian intarsia provoked new ways of thinking about human relationships to forests, trees, and landscapes at a time when knowledge and beliefs about the natural world were being radically transformed. From the mid-15th to early 16th century, intarsia panels formed the backdrop for spiritual practice and everyday life, and intarsia makers were key participants in networks of architects, sculptors, and painters who were responsible for the building and decoration of churches and palaces. Intarsia furnished the Santo in Padua, the Stanza della Segnatura in Rome, choir stalls and sacristies in churches and monasteries, and countless mobile furnishings, such as doors, desks, cupboards, and chests. Yet despite its significance, intarsia long occupied art history’s peripheries. Writing as intarsia declined, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) criticized its makers (“more patient than skilled in design”) and fragile materials (“vulnerable to worms and fire”) in favor of painting and sculpture.

The departure point for my research was a key aspect of Vasari’s criticism: intarsia’s biological and ecological embeddedness. Accordingly, my project began with a series of questions: How did intarsia makers obtain the wood species used for their panels? What criteria did they use? And how did they craft wood in ways that drew attention to its properties? To address these questions, I embarked on two years of field research in Italy, visiting more than a dozen sites with intarsia panels, gathering workshop records, investigating processes for selecting materials, and consulting archival sources and conservation reports. I also examined philosophical, spiritual, and poetic literature for references to woodlands, trees, and timber to understand how intarsia makers understood both their materials and the act of working with wood.

This research yielded extraordinary examples of how arboreal life was thematized in intarsia panels and intertwined with philosophical and spiritual discourses. In a panel of Saint Jerome from the Marches, woodworm traces riddle the saint’s fingers and hands, recalling the veins and wrinkles that connoted his suffering in the wilderness. In an intarsiate skull in the Lodi Cathedral, damaged wood underscores the symbolic import of the memento mori, a reminder of the fragility of life, and a green fungal stain luminates a crown of laurel leaves, symbols of eternal youth and beauty. The panels and others like them breathe with an arboreal intelligence, their organicity and instability reinforcing spiritual and moral notions of sacrifice, transformation, and becoming. I then examined how the insights and expertise of intarsia makers were taken up by other artists, especially painters. For example, in a painting of Saint Jerome by Filippino Lippi (1457–1504), a crucifix emerges from a rotting stump whose details betray an experiential knowledge of woodland ecology: beetles emerge from cracks in the wood, mushrooms cling to the bark, and its surfaces bear evidence of the fungal infection used to color intarsia panels.

By demonstrating how the making of intarsia, often conducted outside of Italy’s principal artistic centers, spurred important innovations in painting, my research bolsters recent calls to recognize the period’s artistic pluralism and mobility. The project also disrupts long-held notions about the primacy of text, underscoring the ways in which objects (trees and timber), lived experience (exploring the forest), and sensory faculties (inspecting and caressing wood) can produce knowledge and structure thought about the natural world. I argue that intarsia, long viewed as an interstitial (and “minor”) art, ought to be appreciated for its connectivity; it encourages a conception of an arboreal and vegetal world that subverts Aristotelian notions of plants as sedentary and lifeless, replaced instead by one in which plants are energetic and inventive.

University of California, Los Angeles
David E. Finley Fellow, 2022–2025

David P. Bardeen recently joined the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as assistant curator for European painting and sculpture, with principal responsibilities for its Italian and Spanish collections. He has published and forthcoming articles in The Art Bulletin, I Tatti Studies, and several edited symposia volumes. He is also pursuing two book projects: “Intarsia, Painting, and the Germination of Italian Renaissance Art” and “Toward a Vermicular History of Renaissance Art.”