Word: inlaid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...draft casting furnaces, the Indian goldsmiths attained a level of technical skill that seems no less amazing today than it did in the 16th century, when that consummate metalworker Benvenuto Cellini is said to have spent weeks trying (and failing) to duplicate an Aztec fish of flexible silver plates inlaid with gold. The earlier goldworking cultures of Peru used hammered sheets as their basic material, but the Colombian artisans preferred to cast their images from gold. They were masters of the lost-wax technique, whereby a model of clay and charcoal was formed and then covered with thin sheets...
...insubstantiality to it. A pale orange silk prayer rug with silver and green blossoms, which may have belonged to the Shah himself, looks as if it would have crumbled to dust if he had ever knelt on it. Though they are lethal weapons, his damascened swords and daggers are inlaid with golden flowers and lines of flowing script. The astrolabe looks more like an extravagantly ingenious toy than a working navigation instrument. Even the coins of Isfahan look too pretty to spend...
However the deck was codified, the materials and designs were not. Sheet silver cards appeared in Augsburg at the turn of the 17th century, made for Orthodox Jews whose religious laws forbade them to touch pasteboard decks at Passover. Silk and cotton or plaited straw were inlaid into the cards to reproduce gay theatrical costumes in their original fabric, like the 17th century Pulcinello opposite. The superb min-chiate (or tarot) cards done in the 15th century by Bonifacio Bembo for Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, are so elaborate in their detailed painting, embossment and gilding that they could seldom...
...materials; witness his writing box, with a design of irises, pool and bridge. The iris leaves and stems are gold lacquer, the flowers mother-of-pearl inlay, the bridge columns are rendered in silver while the planks, which run diagonally across the lid and down the sides, are dull inlaid lead. What Renaissance casket would not look fussy and florid beside this container? But it was in painting that Korin's virtuosity showed; especially in his screen Red and White Plum Trees. It is to Japanese decoration what Matisse's Red Studio is to modern decorative...
...18th century inro are complemented by a fierce little demon mask with ivory horns. In a sense, the extreme limit of aestheticization was reached by the makers of tsubas. Considered merely as an object, the 19th century sword guard of the blue-black copper alloy known as shakudo, inlaid with gold maple leaves (the gold patchy, as in autumn), is sumptuous enough. But the idea of dying with so delicate a work of art attached to one's stomach by two feet of razor-sharp steel could only have arisen in Edo Japan. ·Robert Hughes