our
workshops for wood carving and intarsia in Florence at one time (1478,
as Fabroni says in his life of Lorenzo the Magnificent), from which one
may conclude that work of a certain sort was plentiful and lucrative,
and panels of intarsia were certainly sometimes exported, but it may be
observed that all the most celebrated intarsiatori practised some other
form of art also, and generally abandoned intarsia sooner or later; the
exceptions being those who belonged to the Olivetan and Dominican
orders, and therefore had no anxiety about their living. Of these
craftsmen the most celebrated were Fra Giovanni da Verona and Fra
Damiano of Bergamo, whose works were so elaborate and so finely executed
as to excite the suspicion that they were painted with the brush, though
supposed to be executed with wood and the chisel. The anecdote of the
Emperor Charles V.'s trial of Fra Damiano's tarsia panel in S. Domenico,
Bologna, attests the wonderful quality of the work, and its success in
attaining a doubtful aim, and Barili's inscription in the panel showing
himself at work shows that it was not uncommon for such panels to be
supposed to be the work of the brush. The designs from which the
intarsia was executed were often furnished by painters of repute, and
pictures or portions of pictures were copied, a proceeding which Fra
Giovanni's discovery of stains and washes of different kinds made
easier, until the proper limits of the art were far overpassed, and its
decorative quality quite lost sight of in the attempt to rival a form of
art the requirements of which were quite different. The beautiful
arabesques, which the designers of the early Renaissance poured forth
with exhaustless fertility, show the capabilities of the process for
decorating flat surfaces, and the perspectives of cupboards and
buildings were often most successful without passing the limits imposed
by the material.

The question of the limits within which the craftsman's effort should be
confined in any form of art craftsmanship is a thorny one, for the
attempt to overstep those limits has always had attractions for the
craftsman who is master of his craft, and who sighs for fresh fields to
conquer, knowing better than the outsider what are the difficulties
which he has overcome successfully in any piece of work from the side of
craftsmanship, though often with disastrous results when the matter is
regarded from the point of view of excellence in design and purit