How a Renaissance wood room at the Met is shaping contemporary art
A 15th-century interior built to impress an Italian duke is finding new life in the studios of contemporary artists. The Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has become a touchstone for Alison Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Bühler-Rose, both of whom are using intarsia and marquetry to rethink what wood can do in an image-saturated present.
The Gubbio Studiolo was created for Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, and remains one of the most elaborate examples of trompe l’oeil woodwork in the Renaissance. Its shelves appear to hold books, musical instruments, armor, and other emblems of scholarship and power. Philippe de Montebello, the former Met director, once called it “an astounding masterpiece of Italian Renaissance woodwork,” a description that still fits the room’s strange authority.
For Taylor, the encounter was immediate. She said she saw the Studiolo after arriving in New York in 2003 and thought, “I need to do that.” That impulse now informs the marquetry hybrid paintings she is showing in “I’ll Be Your Mirror” at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco through May 30. Her work treats wood not as a neutral support, but as a medium capable of carrying image, memory, and a kind of compressed narrative.
Bühler-Rose arrived at the same tradition through a different route. Raised in the punk scene, later a Hare Krishna monk, and long interested in art-historical tropes, he connected the Gubbio room to his own practice after wandering into it at the Met. At Independent, he is presenting a solo booth with Stems Gallery of Brussels. His process begins with a Photoshop composite, which is then translated into wood with Mysorean artisans. The resulting surfaces exploit the natural colors of different woods, from saturated yellows and reds to blues and violets.
His booth includes a four-panel trompe l’oeil of shelves filled with objects both inside and outside his collection, among them an issue of The Fox and a Sol LeWitt postcard from 1997. The work also points back to the Pictures Generation, which Bühler-Rose cites as a major influence for the way artists such as Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and Sarah Charlesworth responded to the flood of images around them.
The appeal of these techniques may lie in their resistance to speed. Wood carries weight. Inlay demands time. And in an era defined by endless reproduction, that slowness has become part of the message. Bühler-Rose will also have a solo show at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton opening July 18, extending this renewed conversation between Renaissance craft and contemporary visual culture.
