A post-Nasrid inlaid wooden chest, Spain, 16th century

A very similar inlaid wood coffer of comparable size, dated to circa 1550, is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (RP 7627/189). It was originally in the Certosa di Pavia monastery complex in Lombardy, North Italy and was initially thought to have been produced in Italy. This attribution has now been revised to Spain. It has been suggested that the coffer was probably presented to the Certosa monastery by a visiting pilgrim from Spain or a monk belonging to the Carthusian religious order.

The technique of 'certosina' (also known as lavoro di intarsio or intarsia alla certosina) is a type of inlaid work made with polygonal tesserae of various coloured woods and bone arranged in geometric patterns. It is known as alla certosina after the Carthusian church in Pavia, not very far from Genoa which has an altarpiece decorated in this technique. Certosina is traditionally thought to have been made in Genoa or the Veneto region in northern Italy. However, Spain is a more likely centre of production, based on the abstract geometric, and sometime floral ornamentation (M. Rosser-Owen, Islamic Arts from Spain, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2010, p.89.) The art of inlaying small fragments of different coloured woods in geometrical patterns in Andalusia during the Nasrid period. There existed an ongoing tradition of inlay and incrustation in Spain ever since the new minbar was commissioned by the Umayyad caliph al-Hakam II in the tenth century for the Great Mosque of Cordoba (ibid., p.66). 

For a closely related bone-inlaid wood chest, see Christie’s London, 26 October 2023, lot 46. For another sixteenth century, post-Nasrid wood casket with comparable decoration, see the preceding lot.