Renaissance Intarsia and Theories of Art

My PhD is the first study in Western philosophy to provide a rigorous defence of the lost practice of intarsia as an artistic medium. Intarsia is a technique that builds complex images using cut and coloured pieces of wood. Examples populate Renaissance churches and palaces across Italy. Many famous artists participated in its creation, including Lorenzo Lotto and Sandro Botticelli. Yet, as it has typically been miscast as a mere craft it has been neglected in theoretical discussions. Luca Trevisan’s work in Art History has confirmed that intarsia had a significant presence in the artworld of Renaissance Italy. This poses questions for the exclusion of intarsia from the fine arts. The aim of my research has been to raise, articulate and answer these questions. The research has two strands. The first argues for a significant revision in theoretical approach to a key question in the philosophy of art and the second provides a philosophical foundation for the aesthetic appreciation of intarsia. The dominant approach to the question ‘is it art?’ since the 1960s has been purely nominal: variations on the theme that something is art if we call it ‘art’. My research shows that nominal approaches to art are incomplete because they cannot make sense of practices such as intarsia. Therefore, I argue for a return to more substantive ways of theorizing about art. The study of intarsia also requires further theoretical innovation: 1) a definition of multistage approaches to art; 2) a theoretical explanation of collaborative authorship (which I provide, based on the work of Michael Bratman); and 3) a theory of appreciation of intarsia analogous to the kind of account Wollheim gave of painting.