The artists of Rome are celebrated for making beautiful cameos, both in shell and in stone. The figures are very nicely drawn, and are very beautifully cut, and when finished are set as pins, bracelets, and other ornaments.
The mosaics, on the other hand, are made in a very different way. In these, the design is represented by different colored stones or bits of glass worked in together, with great care, in an opening made in the material serving for the groundwork. Rollo and Charlie went into one of the shops, and saw a man making one of these mosaics. He was working at a table. On one side was a small painting on a card, which was his model. He was copying this painting in mosaic. The bits of glass that he was working with were in the form of slender bars, not much larger than a stiff bristle. They were of all imaginable colors—the several colors being each kept by itself, in the divisions of a box on the table. The man took up these bars, one by one, and broke off small pieces of them, of the colors that he wanted, with a pair of pincers, and set them into the work. He put them in perpendicularly, and the lower ends went into some soft composition, placed there to receive and hold them. The upper ends, of course, came together at the surface of the work.
The man who was making the mosaic told Rollo, that as soon as he had finished placing the pieces for the whole design, he should grind off the surface so as to make it smooth, and polish it. It would then have the appearance of a painted picture.
You would think that as the colors of the design are thus represented by separate pieces of glass, put in one after the other, the result would be a sort of mottled appearance, or at least that the gradations of hue would be sharp and harsh in their effect. But it is not so. The pieces are so small, and the different shades succeed each other so regularly, that when viewed from the ordinary distance, the junctions disappear altogether, and the shades mingle and blend together in the softest and most perfect manner.
The mosaic which the workman was making in the shop where Rollo and Charles went in, was a small one, intended to form part of a bracelet. There were, however, some in the same shop that were quite large. They were framed like pictures, and were hanging up against the wall. Indeed, there was nothing but the circumstance that they were in a mosaic shop, to denote that they were not pictures, beautifully painted in oil. One was a landscape; another was a portrait of a beautiful girl; another was a basket of fruit and flowers.
In some of the churches of Rome, there are mosaics of very large size, which are exact and beautiful copies of some of the most celebrated paintings in the world. Strangers coming into the churches and looking at these pictures, never imagine them to be mosaics, and when they are told that they are so, they can scarcely believe the story. But on examining them very near, or in looking at them through an opera glass,—for sometimes you cannot get very near them,—you can easily see the demarcations between the little stones.
It is a very curious circumstance that the most ancient pictures in the churches of Rome and Italy are mosaics, and not paintings. Mosaics seem to have come first in the history of art, and paintings followed, in imitation of them. Indeed, the arranging of different colored stones in a pavement, or in a floor, so as to represent some ornamental design, would naturally be the first attempt at decoration made in the construction of buildings. Then would follow casing the walls with different colored marbles, arranged in pretty ways, and finally the representation of men and animals would be attempted. This we find, from an examination of ancient monuments, was the actual course of things, and painting in oil came in at the end as an imitation of pictures in stone.
Rollo and Charles were induced to go into the mosaic shop by the invitation of the workman, whose table, as it happened, stood near the door. He saw the two boys looking in somewhat wistfully, as they went by, and he invited them to walk in. He saw at once from their appearance that they were visitors that had just arrived in town, and though he did not expect that they would buy any of his mosaics themselves, he thought that there might be ladies in their party who would come and buy, if he treated the boys politely. It was on that account that he invited them to come in. And when they had looked about the establishment as much as they wished, and were ready to go away, he gave them each one of his cards, and asked them to give the cards to the ladies of their party.
"But there are no ladies of my party," said Rollo.