No one knows who the first marquetarian was, but records from the tombs of the Pharoahs tell us that the Egyptians used bronze adzes & axes to produce veneers. They also imported exotic species to decorate their wooden caskets with mosaic designs.

Marble "incrustations" appear in the palace of King Mausole in Halicarnassus from 350BC. During the Roman Empire intarsia certosina was developed, a technique whereby cavities were carved into panels to hold the pieces of veneer. The art was virtually lost during the Dark Ages and it was not until the 14th century that it re-emerged from the "cloistered intarsiatori" for the adornment of the cathedrals of northern Italy and Hungary. During this period a new technique called intarsia geometrica was developed in Tuscany in which the whole surface to be decorated was covered with the pieces of veneer. This technique was perfected in the 15th century by Benedetto da Maiano and his brother Guiliano who developed the dammaianesque style of decorative geometric borders & the use of pictorial effects & perspective.

During the15th & 16th centuries tinted veneers began to be produced firstly by boiling the woods with strong pigments and later by using acid or fire. As repetitious cutting with chisels was time consuming and not very accurate a process of block marquetry called tarsia a toppo was developed which is not unlike the way that "seaside rock" is made. Strips of wood are glued together so that the end grain creates the pattern.

From the 17th century the use of saws to cut veneers allowed greater freedom of artistic expression. The method of cutting several veneers at once, tarsia incastro, was developed in Germany and later adopted by Andre-Charles Boulle whose name is synonymous with the use of metals particularly brass - & tortoiseshell.

The development of technology from the 18th century produced a series of different types of cutting tools from the humble, but much loved marqueter`s knife, the carpenter`s donkey perfected in the 19th Century to the jigsaws in common use today in Italy & the East.

In the late 20th century Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation technology became available to an increasing variety of industrial processes and in 1993 Anita Lear was inspired by her love of marquetry and knowledge of optics and CAD systems to build her first laser. The combination of high tech cutting processes and artistic craftsmanship enables Anita Marquetry to produce the finest quality inlays for which the company is well known world wide.