“Pietra Dura” was a mosaic laid upon either a thick wood or a marble foundation.  Lapis lazuli, malachite, and jasper were used largely, as well as bloodstones, onyx, and Rosso Antico.  In Florentine Pietra Dura work, the inlay of two hard and equally cut materials reached its climax.

Arnolfo del Cambio, who built the Cathedral of Sta.  Maria Fiore in Florence, being its architect from 1294 till 1310, was the first in that city to use coloured slabs and panels of marble in a sort of flat mosaic on a vast scale on the outside of buildings.  His example has been extensively followed throughout Italy.  The art of Pietra Dura mosaic began under Cosimo I. who imported it, if one may use such an expression, from Lombardy.  It was used chiefly, like Gobelins Tapestry, to make very costly presents, otherwise unprocurable, for grandees and crowned heads.  For a long time the work was a Royal monopoly.  There are several interesting examples in the Pitti Palace, in this case in the form of tables.  Flowers, fruits, shells, and even figures and landscapes have been represented in this manner.

Six masters of the art of Pietra Dura came from Milan in 1580, to instruct the Florentines:  and a portrait of Cosimo I. was the first important result of their labours.  It was executed by Maestro Francesco Ferucci.  The Medicean Mausoleum in Florence exhibits magnificent specimens of this craft.

In the time of Ferdinand I. the art was carried by Florentines to India, where it was used in decorating some of the palaces.  Under Ferdinand II.  Pietra Dura reached its climax, there being in Florence at this time a most noted Frenchman, Luigi Siries, who settled in Florence in 1722.  He refined the art by ceasing to use the stone as a pigment in producing pictures, and employing it for the more legitimate purposes of decoration.  Some of the large tables in the Pitti are his work.  Flowers and shells on a porphyry ground were especially characteristic of Siries.  There was a famous inlayer of tables, long before this time, named Antonio Leopardi, who lived from 1450 to 1525.

The inlay of wood has been called marquetry and intarsia, and was used principally on furniture and choir stalls.  Labarte gives the origin of this art in Italy to the twelfth century.  The Guild of Carpenters in Florence had a branch of Intarsiatura workers, which included all forms of inlay in wood.  It is really more correct to speak of intarsia when we allude to early Italian work, the word being derived from “interserere,” the Latin for “insert;” while marquetry originates in France, much later, from “marqueter,” to mark.  Italian wood inlay began in Siena, where one Manuello is reported to have worked in the Cathedral in 1259.  Intarsia was also made in Orvieto at this time.  Vasari did not hold the art in high estimation, saying that it was practised by “those persons who possessed more patience than skill in design,” and I confess to a furtive concurrence in Vasari’s opinion.  He criticizes it a little illogically, however, when he goes on to say that the “work soon becomes dark, and is always in danger of perishing from the worms and by fire,” for in these respects it is no more perishable than any great painting on canvas or panel.  Vasari always is a little extreme, as we know.