The revival at Venice of the mosaic art, chiefly for internal and external artistic decorations of private and public buildings, goes on uninterruptedly and working in mosaic is now (our consul says) carried on in that city on a large scale and with great success, says the London Daily News. A mosaic is a work framed by the use of “tesserae” or small cubes of enamel, marble or other material and of a gold-and-silver leaf between two films of the purest glass of various colors, which are skillfully mixed on cement so as to produce the effect of a picture. The composition of human figures in different attitudes, animals, draperies or other objects requiring a careful delineation are intrusted to the best workmen and the execution of the background to the less trained workmen. The splendid mosaics which are made at Venice continue to be in great demand in the artistic markets of the world for the skillful manner in which the tesserae are arranged, for their extreme beauty and delicacy of color, the rich harmony of effect and from their being nearly indestructible. The manner in which mosaics are now made for decorative purposes is quite different from the elaborate system used by the ancients, which consisted in fixing the tesserae one by one on the cement previously applied on the wall. The modern method of the Venetian school consists in executing the mosaic in the workshop by having the tesserae fixed with common paste on the section of the cartoon assigned to each workman. When all the parts of the mosaic are complete they are put together on the floor or on a special wooden frame. The mosaic, which is then a perfect representation of the original cartoon, is again divided into section on the reverse side, marked with a progressive number and carefully packed to be sent off to the place for which it is intended. The surface of the wall where the mosaic is to be fixed is then covered with cement, into which the sections of the mosaic are uniformly pressed according to their numbers and the key-plan supplied to the fixers. When the cement has hardened the paper on which the tesserae have been pasted is gently taken off and the faithful copy of the original cartoon is again exhibited on the right side.
Now you can buy mosaic jars, drapery finials and wastebaskets at your local Big Box Home Improvement Store. But they don’t have the pictorial part, just the background as done by the “less trained workmen.” Or, as every watcher of DIY shows knows, you can make your own with a bit of glass and some grout.
Somehow, it just doesn’t seem the same.