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Art Of Wood Carving

Wood Carving is an art made by carving wood with a sharp hand tool to form functional or decorative objects.

Wood carving is one of the oldest crafts in the world. Carving dates back to the stone ages. Early humans were using stones, bones and obviously wood for carving their tools.

Although wood is an easy-to-use material, there are not too many old samples, since it easily deforms and dissolves in nature. The Shigir Idol is the world's oldest known wood carving. It dates to the era of Mesolithic art, about 7500 BCE. There is another example from ancient Egypt in the Cairo Museum which possibly dates back to 4000 BCE. It is known that wood was in widespread use throughout all the ancient civilizations.

Intarsia is a kind of wood art done by using different kinds of wood pieces, which have different natural colors and grains that fitted together like a mosaic to form 3D pictures and illustrations. Intarsia is, in a way, painting pictures by the natural colors and grains of wood.

It is thought that the Latin word "interserere" which means to insert, evolved into the word “Intarsia”. Another alternative for the origin of the word intarsia is that it has been derived from the Arabic tarsi’ (the act of inlaying, from the verb rassa’a – to inlay). It has emerged for the first time in Europe in Italy. Then it spread throughout Europe. Most beautiful samples have been created during the Renaissance period between 1400-1600 years. However Modern intarsia is a little bit different than ancient intarsia, it has a third dimension, depth.

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