Let us peek into the Gubbio Studiolo, one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s greater – and largely -- unknown gems from the Italian Renaissance. The so-called small study is only the size of a walk-in closet, and the latticework wooden shutters of its curious cabinets have been left ajar as if Federico da Montefeltro, the 15th-Century duke of Urbino who commissioned the room for his palace in Gubbio, has stepped outside briefly for a bit of fresh air. The arrangement of objects is voyeuristically delightful: There are casually artistic vignettes of leatherbound books, some with their pages enticingly open; an organ, its slender pipes shining, a flute, a drum, a tambourine, an hourglass with the sand slowing seeping, a compass and candlesticks. Turn the corner, and there’s a bird singing in a gilded cage.

As long as the duke is out, we are tempted to sit upon the built-in wooden benches that rim his inner sanctum. Would that we could! For, alas, the eye and the brain are fooled by this exquisite bit of trompe l’oeil. But even knowing this, there is more than meets the eye: The Gubbio Studiolo works its magic through intarsia, or inlays, an art form that, along with marquetry and parquetry, has been enchanting viewers ever since the first craftsman figured out how to place little pieces of wood and metal into pretty pictures.
Marquetry has remained popular and pricey, a point driven home recently when contemporary British furniture designer David Linley sold a secretary with the city of Slazburg depicted in marquetry for $175,000 to London dealer Konrad Bernheimer to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.

“Marquetry has always been considered a high form of furniture and an expensive form of furniture,” says Christie’s Stefan Kist, vice president/specialist, European Furniture and Decorative Arts. “When you look at record prices at auction, marquetry pieces are always featured at the top.  The record for French furniture – a 1779 commode by Jean-Henri Riesener for King Louis XVI that sold in 1999 for the equivalent of $11 million -- is a piece with marquetry, the record for German furniture is one with it. And Italian and English marquetry pieces are near the top.”

Although the terms inlay and intarsia, marquetry and parquetry are more often than not used interchangeably, there are subtle distinctions in their construction that set each apart. According to the experts, inlays are pieces of veneer, wood, metal or other materials that are set into carved recesses of a solid piece; intarsia is the Italian word for inlay; marquetry is a mosaic whose puzzle-like pieces are put together to form a pictorial design; and parquetry is marquetry with a geometric pattern.      

Regardless of which descriptive term is applied, the pieces fall into three groups: Those known for their superlative craftsmanship; those renowned for their innovative design; and the most desirable -- those that possess the best of both.

The Gubbio Studiolo aside, the Golden Age of marquetry occurred in the 18th Century, with France’s master cabinetmaker Andre-Charles Boulle leading the way, piece by intricate piece. “The king had Boulle, and everyone else wanted it,” says Helen Costantino Fioratti, owner of L’Antiquaire and The Connoisseur Inc. in Manhattan.

Following the lead of Boulle and Pierre Gole, other makers, notably France’s Jean-Henri Riesener, Jean-Francois Oeben, Jacques Dubois and Andre-Louis Gilbert; Italy’s Giuseppe Maggolini and Pietro Piffetti; and Germany’s Abraham and David Roentgen fused their art and craft of marquetry to create superlative works.

By the third quarter of the 19th Century, the notable furniture firm of Herter Brothers had made a mark for itself by making very important pieces inlaid with metals and mother of pearl for very important clients. “Of all the cabinetmakers at that time, it was the most noted for its excellent marquetry,” says architect David Scott Parker, owner of Associated Artists LLC, which is based in Southport, Connecticut. “They moved taste away from heavy carving to a more delicate surface treatment and more two-dimensional designs that eventually would move to the turn of the century’s abstraction that led to modernism. Their marquetry became the whole message of the piece; sometimes it’s all you see, and it takes

While the Art Nouveau laid the groundwork for pictorial depictions of flowing floral motifs in marquetry by makers like Emil Galle and Louis Marjorelle, Art Deco greats like Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Maurice Dufrene relied upon stylized abstractions in wood and metal. “In the modernist period in the early 1930s, there was little marquetry because of the economics” of the Great Depression, says Gary Calderwood, owner of the Philadelphia gallery that bears his name. “In the late 1930s, there was a big resurgence in marquetry, some of which is enormously complicated.”

Today, a handful of renowed artists, notably Silas Kopf, Maria Pergay, Jay Stanger and Jean-Charles Spindler, innovatively employ marquetry and parquetry and inlay and intarsia in their work as a means to an artistic end. “There are not a lot of contemporary artists working with marquetry,” says Scott Jacobson, owner of Manhattan’s Leo Kaplan Modern. “It’s highly skilled work and painstaking.”

Stanger, for instance, uses marquetry to bring a painterly quality to his colorful wooden sculptures, which sell for $15,000 to $100,000. “It is a way to incorporate drawing skills into my work,” he says. “It gives a three-dimensional quality to a two-dimensional surface. It turns the piece into a multi-media object.”

Frenchman Spindler, a third-generation marquetry maker whose flat-panel works are $3,500 to $33,000, takes Stanger’s premise one step beyond: He creates marquetry “paintings” with exotic woods like 4,000-year-old petrified marshland oak. “The way he works is different from the traditional, especially on his more abstract contemporary pieces,” says Samantha Newman, owner and president of Manhattan-based Aimara Masterpieces, which also represents a group of marquetry masters from Argentina. “I know a lot about marquetry, and I still don’t know how he does it.”

Regardless of the style or type of inlay, the wide appeal of marquetry is more than surface deep. Art lovers, for example, are drawn to Pergay’s work, which incorporates stainless steel inlays in a variety of finishes and other unusual combinations of precious woods and natural elements like mother of pearl, says Suzanna Demisch, a partner in Manhattan’s Demisch Danant, “because they can’t figure out how it’s done.”

While cutting-edge sculptural works like Pergay’s, which sell for $15,000 to $150,000, prove that marquetry and parquetry and inlays and intarsia always will have a place in the art world, the craft it takes to turn out tour-de-force pieces is another matter.

“The artisans we work with are three generations old,” Newman says. “They are getting old, and the new ones aren’t doing it. This craftsmanship will disappear, I’m sorry to say.”

Which makes every single piece of the Gubbio Studiolo all that more precious.