Made from minute pieces of colored glass, micromosaics make the most amazing, often painterly pictures. Some of the best micromosaics contain an astounding 3,000 to 5,000 tiles per square inch.
From the 17th to the 19th century, wealthy Europeans on their Grand Tour of Italy bought these micromosaics as jewelry and souvenirs. The micromosaics depicted all manner of things, especially quintessential scenes of Rome: the people, landscapes, and, of course, famous architecture such as the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Square, and the Roman Forum.
Sometimes the micromosaics would be inlaid into furniture, snuffboxes, or decorative boxes. Many micromosaics were sent straight to jewelers in Paris and London to be set into jewelry. However, micromosaic jewelry fell out of fashion in the 1870s.
Making Micromosaics
According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, a micromosaic artist fuses different colored glass mosaic tiles to create an assortment of colors, each unique in size and shape. Then the artist melts a selection of these tiles in a metal crucible and pulls the molten glass into long canes (filati) that solidify upon cooling. The artist scores the canes and carefully snaps them into tiny, oblong pieces (tesserae).The artist then prepares a metal base with paste, into which he or she then marks the design. Using tweezers, the artist then painstakingly places each teeny-tiny mosaic piece onto the paste.
Once the picture is complete, the artist coats the composition with a few layers of wax, then sands it down to a smooth polish.
In early micromosaics, the tiles were visible, but later artists developed ways to seamlessly set the designs so that the tiles disappeared and exquisite, painterly micromosaics emerged.
