The museum presents a black Japanese wooden cabinet with four round carved legs, with one locking door and a locking drawer on top.

The upper and lower bases are decorated with artistic carvings. At the front, the cabinet is flanked by two carved columns. The middle part of the door is adorned with a marquetry mosaic from pieces of rare woods. A bamboo bush and the ground on which a rooster and a hen are standing are depicted in brown color against a golden background. Above and below the image, there is a floral pattern, separated from the image by convex relief half-arcs and circles.

The lid of the drawer is adorned with a floral pattern. It is inlaid using the technique of marquetry, which is the French word for “mosaic”. The idea of the technique is to arrange thin pieces of precious wood and glue them onto a simple wooden base (either birch or oak) in the form of a pattern or a composition design. The thickness of the pieces ranges from 1 to 3 mm. Their variety of colors and textures is eye-catching.

Each composition made in this original technique is remarkable for its diversity: like a holographic image, it reveals itself to the viewer in a new way from different angles every time.

Marquetry enjoyed its first major surge of popularity during the Renaissance when a machine tool was first used to produce veneer — thin plates of precious wood. The mosaic compositions and patterns were used to decorate tabletops, doors of wardrobes and cabinets, headboards and stained-glass windows. Some skilled craftsmen even used the marquetry technique to create perspective views of city streets and squares by rendering the volume and using the play of light and shadow.

Back then, cabinetmakers had a hundred types of black, red, pink, violet and lemon wood at their disposal. The process of marquetry at the time did not differ much from the way it is done nowadays: the formed pieces of wood were burnt, then tinted, and etched to broaden the color palette and highlight details.