Word: intarsia
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...Pietra Dura (Hard Stone) was one of the busiest places in Florence. The duties of its craftsmen members: turning out the intricate designs of inlaid marble and semiprecious stones with which the Medici loved to decorate their palaces and chapels. After the Medici, the art, known as stone intarsia, went out of fashion; but a handful of institute members kept its difficult technique alive, occupied themselves mainly with repairing intarsia objects in Florentine museums and copying the old-fashioned designs...
Last week some strikingly new intarsia was on display in Manhattan. In place of the elaborate baroque scrolls, shells and garlands of the 16th and 17th Centuries, there were surrealist nudes reclining in desolate plateaus, a composition of pistols and playing cards after William Harnett, gay conglomerations of striped balloons, kites and butterflies-all laid out in marble, malachite, lapis lazuli...