he other hand, is a word of
much later origin, and comes from the French "marqueter," to spot, to
mark; it seems, therefore, accurate to apply the former term to those
inlays of wood in which a space is first sunk in the solid to be
afterwards filled with a piece of wood (or sometimes some other
material) cut to fit it, and to use the latter for the more modern
practice of cutting several sheets of differently-coloured thin wood
placed together to the same design, so that by one cutting eight or ten
copies of different colours may be produced which will fit into each
other, and only require subsequent arranging and glueing, as well as for
the more artistic effects of the marquetry of the 17th and 18th
centuries, which were produced with similar veneers. The process of
inlaying is of the most remote antiquity, and the student may see in the
cases of the British Museum, at the Louvre, and in other museums,
examples of both Assyrian and Egyptian inlaid patterns of metal and
ivory, or ebony or vitreous pastes, upon both wood and ivory, dating
from the 8th and 10th centuries before the Christian Era, or earlier.
The Greeks and Romans also made use of it for costly furniture and
ornamental sculpture; in Book 23 of the "Odyssey," Ulysses, describing
to Penelope the bride-bed which he had made, says--"Beginning from this
head-post, I wrought at the bedstead till I had finished it, and made it
fair with inlaid work of gold, and of silver, and of ivory"; the statue
and throne of Jupiter at Olympia had ivory, ebony, and many other
materials used in its construction, and the chests in which clothes
were kept, mentioned by Homer, were some of them ornamented with inlaid
work in the precious metals and ivory. Pausanias describes the box of
Kypselos, in the opisthodomos of the Temple of Hera, at Olympia, as
elliptical in shape, made of cedar wood and adorned with mythological
representations, partly carved in wood and partly inlaid with gold and
ivory, in five strips which encircled the whole box, one above another.
The Greek words for inlaying used by Homer and Pindar are "[Greek:
daidallo]" and "[Greek: kollao]," and their derivatives, the first being
also used for embroidering; Homer and Hesiod also use "[Greek:
poikilos]" for "inlaid," which shows how closely at that time the arts
were interwoven. These words have left no trace in the later terms,
though [Greek: kollao] means to fix together, or to glue, and it is
tempting to conne