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Box, with micromosaic picture of dog

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made in Italy

Box, with micromosaic picture of dog
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This circular granodiorite box is decorated with a micromosaic of a dog. It was made in Italy in the late 18th or early 19th century.

The small cube-shaped tesserae are laid in straight rows.

Micromosaics are built up of hundreds or thousands of minute tessarae - cubes or chips - of coloured glass. They were developed by mosaicists employed by the Vatican Mosaic Workshop who began to fear for their jobs as orders for large-scale mosaics began to dry up in the 1750s. The credit for their invention is generally given to Giacomo Raffaelli (1753-1836), an employee of the Vatican Workshop. He exhibited his work in his private studio in the Piazza di Spagna in 1775. A later guidebook reveals that there were at least twenty mosaic workshops in the vicinity of the Piazza around 1873-4, all frequented by tourists.

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