THE CRAFT
The craft of marquetry
Seven woods, twelve colours, shaded in hot sand. How a drawing becomes an inlaid surface in Sorrento.
Marquetry is drawing with wood.
No paint, no print, no transfer. Every colour in the finished surface is a piece of wood, cut to shape and laid beside its neighbours until the picture closes. The method has been practised on this peninsula for two centuries, and in this workshop since 1957.
ONE
The drawing and the woods
Each design begins on paper. Maple, walnut, dark mahogany, ash, walnut burl, bubinga and oak are chosen for their grain, then dyed in twelve colours — the palette that gives Sorrentine marquetry its range without a drop of paint.
TWO
The cut
Sheets of veneer are stacked and cut together with the fretsaw, the blade following the drawn line by eye. A single lid can hold hundreds of pieces, each one leaving the saw ready for the place it was cut to fill.
THREE
The sandblasting
The cut pieces are passed through hot sand, which scorches their edges to different depths. It is how the craft draws light and shadow in wood alone: a petal darkened at its tip, a fold of drapery deepened at its crease. Colour comes from the dyes; dimension comes from the sand.
FOUR
The inlay
The pieces are laid one by one into the panel, colour against colour, until the drawing reappears in wood. Nothing is glued into place until the whole picture reads correctly — a single misplaced grain is visible for the life of the piece.
SORRENTO
Two centuries of inlay
Benedictine monks worked inlaid wood on this coast as early as the sixth century, but the craft as Sorrento knows it begins with Antonio Damora, who presented his work at the court of Francis I in 1825 and then opened a workshop in the town. Colour arrived around 1840, when dyed veneers widened a palette that had been limited to natural grain. In 1886 a school of applied art was founded to teach the trade formally, and marquetry became the signature of the peninsula. The Ercolano workshop opened in 1957 and has worked in that tradition ever since.