Micromosaics

Mark D. Ruffner © 2013

My great-grandmother, Emma Breguet, died at a young age, and little of what belonged to her is left. What remains reveals that she gravitated to all things inlaid, including micromosaics. Today I thought I'd share one of her paperweights, apparently a souvenir of Rome.

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Below are the individual sights, and you can click on each of them to enlarge the images. (Because the black marble base has many hairline scratches, I've obscured them so that you might focus more easily on these little masterpieces.)

click to enlarge  |  Temple of Hercules Victor

click to enlarge  |  The Colosseum

click to enlarge  |  Forum Romanum

click to enlarge  |  The Pantheon

click to enlarge  |  Vatican Square

For larger mosaics, glass chips called smalti, below, are used (smalto, singular). For micromosaics, smalti is heated and drawn out into long threads called filati, which in that drawing out become very thin. It is this filati that is used in micromosaics, and it is indeed thin; you can see where filati is missing in areas of the Pantheon, above, and that slight deterioration is essentially a flaking.

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Above is smalti, huge in comparison to the filati that would be used in micromosaics.

Because the filati pieces are so tiny, beautiful gradations can be accomplished. Look, for example, at how the skies in all the images above gradate to the horizon, and then see what a stunning effect that creates in the first image of the entire plaque.

click to enlarge  |  http://www.lacma.org/search/node/micromosaics 

Above is one of the most spectacular of micromosaics, an image of the Colosseum measuring 18¾ x 25⅞. It's on extended loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Gilbert Collection. This micromosaic was made circa 1850.
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