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Intarsie (panels of inlaid wood) were used in the Quattrocento and Cinquecento to decorate small rooms and choir stalls. A good example is the decoration of Federico da Montefeltro's studio in Urbino, where his manuscripts were kept and where he read - standing - at a desk from which he could look out through marble arches to the blue mountains of his domain.
Federico had a library of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance texts that numbered over one thousand volumes. The upper portion of this room was hung with twenty-eight paintings of famous learned men painted by Joos van Wassenhove (Justus of Ghent) and Pedro Berruguete. The originals of these paintings are in museums, they are substituted by copies.
Guiliano da Maiano is best known as a woodworker and executor of architectural ornament. The unknown designer of the intarsie in the studiolo may have worked from designs or suggestions by Luciano Laurana. As in many intarsia scheme (such as in the north sacristy of Florence Cathedral), the decoration simulates cabinets and niches; on the lower level, with its latticed compartments, one door appears to be open to show the content. Then comes a zone of ornaments, including the symbols of the duke, then a framework of pilasters, between which one looks into niches with statues, into cabinets with books, candle and hourglass, into a cupboard filled with the duke's armor, and into an architectural perspective with a distant view of mountains and lakes.
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