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Updated: May 18, 2025
"A. Salviati, Avvocato," is the legend of the bell-pull, and you do not by any means take this legal style for that of the restorer of a neglected art, and a possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and "smalts," as they term the small delicate rods of vitreous substance, with which the wonders of the art are achieved.
While the material used in mosaic wall decoration is sometimes a natural product, like marble, porphyry, coral, or alabaster, the picture is composed for the most part of artificially prepared smalts opaque glass of various colours, made in sheets and then cut up into cubes. An infinite variety in gradations of colour and texture is thus made possible.
After this, an establishment for making the smalts and gold glass was set up at Murano, and Venice no longer imported its material. The old Cathedral at Torcello has one of the most perfect examples of the twelfth century mosaic in the world. The entire west end of the church is covered with a rich display of figures and Scriptural scenes.
In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of marqueterie, table-tops, album-covers, paper-weights, brooches, pins and the like, and in others they are sawing the smalts and glass into strips, and grinding the edges.
But one afternoon when he was "Out of town. Will be back Friday" some Rosemont boys scratched in the smalts the tin word, Gentleman. "Let it alone, John," said the next day's Courier. "It's a good ad., and you can live up to it." It stayed. It came to pass in those days that an effort to start a religious revival issued from Suez "University."
Passing through yet another room, where the finished mosaic-works of course not the pictorial mosaics are polished by machinery, we enter the store-room, where the crowded shelves display blocks of smalts and glass of endless variety of color. In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition of the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the establishment produces.
On the desk's top were more specimens, three or four fat old books from Widewood, and on one corner, by the hour, his own feet, in tight boots, when he read Washington's Letters, Story on the Constitution, or the Geology of Dixie. What interested Suez most of all was his sign. It professed no occupation. "John March." That was all it proclaimed, for a time, in gilt, on a field of blue smalts.
Later than these men, there were few mosaic workers of high standing; in Florence the art degenerated into a mere decorative inlay of semi-precious material, heraldic in feeling, costly and decorative, but an entirely different art from that of the Greeks and Romans. Lapis-lazuli with gold veinings, malachite, coral, alabaster, and rare marbles superseded the smalts and gold of an elder day.
Each artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems of smalts already mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments as he proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive his picture, and thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable work of the painter.
But inside of the palace are some two hundred artisans at work, cutting the smalts and glass into the minute fragments of which the mosaics are made, grinding and smoothing these fragments, polishing the completed works, and reproducing, with incredible patience and skill, the lights and shadows of the pictures to be copied.
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