Mosaics large and small.(publishing of catalogue of collection of hardstone mosaics and micromosaics)

Sir Arthur Gilbert was born in London but made his fortune in California. With it, he has formed collections of silver, snuffboxes, and mosaics of hardstones known as pietre dure, and of micro-mosaics made of tiny threads of colored glass called smalti filati. These mosaics large and small range from royal commissions to pricey souvenirs, and Sir Arthur has presented them to the British nation. With the aid of the apparently bottomless Heritage Lottery Fund two opulent volumes have been devoted to cataloguing these collections of mosaics, which are rivaled in comprehensiveness only by the collections in the Vatican Museum in Vatican City and the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

The art of pietre dure experienced a resurgence in Florence beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing until at least the mid-eighteenth century under the patronage of the Medici. From the Florentine workshops the taste for these expensive works of art spread to Dresden, Prague, Kassel, Potsdam, Augsburg, and the court of Louis XIV.

Pietre dure panels decorated cabinets, clocks, tables, ecclesiastical objects, and snuffboxes, and they stood alone as pictures. Subjects were floral arrangements, birds, landscapes, architectural ruins and famous buildings, particularly for the English grand tour souvenir trade.

Some of the more elaborate objects are truly extravagant. One such is a cabinet clock nearly four feet tall that was made in Augsburg in the first quarter of the eighteenth century for an unknown member of the nobility. Pietre dure and smalti filati are but two of the materials that were used. Also included were wood, tortoiseshell, silver, silver gilt, lacquer, mother-of-pearl, glass, mirror, garnets, turquoise, brilliants, painted copper, painted porcelain, ivory, enamel, and brass. The clock has columns, statuettes, a portrait of Apollo cut from sheet silver, a miniature painting of Venus and Mercury, a mirror engraved with a portrait of the goddess Diana behind a tiny door, and drawers faced with pietre dure depictions of a Chinese figure astride a rhinoceros and two Oriental figures in a boat. Inside the first drawer is a tiny nine-piece Meissen tea service of 1720, and inside the other a silver-gilt inkwell and pounce pot and compartments to hold pens and keys. Part shrine to the gods, part desk set, p art calendar and clock, this remarkable creation would have won the place of honor in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue of its day.

In Rome, pietre dure work featured the rare antique marbles locally available. A particularly fine example is a late sixteenth-century rectangular table nearly six feet long that incorporates a large slab of black-and-white marble from the "cave of forgetfulness" in the Pyrenees--a source highly prized in ancient Rome. This otherwise undecorated piece of marble is framed by an elaborate pietre dure border. Other Roman tabletops were made up of specimens of different sorts of marble so that their owners could show off their lapidary connoisseurship.

Often the designs for pietre dure panels were taken from prints, in one case a series of etchings by Jacques Callot of a traveling troupe of performing dwarfs. This makes a most bizarre series of fourteen panels on a tabletop made in Florence between 1775 and 1785. Callot had observed the tiny troupe when it performed at the court of grand duke Cosimo II de' Medici in Florence in the early seventeenth century.

In the center of one circular tabletop is the portrait of a brown horse made of a single piece of jasper enhanced with carved details and black ink. Although made in Rome, the subject is hardly in the taste of the city and seems likely to have been commissioned by an English visitor. Some of these pietre dure tabletops were mounted on hinged stands so that the top could be tilted and admired like a painting on an easel. Paintings in stone made to be hung on the wall were already popular in the sixteenth century. About Sebastiano del Piombo, who tried the technique, Giorgio Vasari wrote: "It pleased everyone a ...