BY LUDOVICO LUCIETTO, VATICAN MOSAIC STUDIO, EARLY 20TH CENTURY

For large scale mosaics, workshops - such as those at the Vatican Mosaic Studio - originally used cubic tesserae, known as smalti, made from ground glass and baked in an oven like enamel. By the 1760s this art had been so perfected that it was possible to produce rods or threads of colored glass, called smalti filati, thin enough to be cut into the minute tesserae used on the present lot. These tiny individual tesserae, in an almost limitless palette of as many as 28,000 colors, allowed truly painterly compositions. The painstaking detail required to work micromosaics meant the smallest were set into snuffboxes and jewelry while larger tables or plaques were massive undertakings. By the 19th century, the Vatican workshop was producing such superior mosaic-work that it operated at the near exclusion of any other mosaic studio). The maker of the present table, Ludovico Lucietto, was a micromosaic artist for the Vatican Mosaic Studio, active in the first part of the 20th century (R. Grieco, Roman Micomosaic, Rome, 2007, p. 304).