ART REVIEW : An Excess of Craftsmanship in ‘Mosaics’

“The Art of Mosaics: Selections From the Gilbert Collection,” an exhibition of 19th-Century Roman and Florentine decorative arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, illuminates two little-known schools of virtuoso craftsmanship--and demonstrates what can go wrong when technical wizardry outstrips aesthetic content.

At the beginning of the 18th Century, the frescoes in St. Peter’s had deteriorated so badly that they had to be replaced with more durable mosaics. The artisans in the Vatican workshops refined their techniques until they could fit up to 1,400 tesserae, or fragments of spun glass, into a square inch of surface. (Their workmanship was so subtle that many visitors to St. Peter’s don’t realize they’re looking at mosaics rather than paintings.)

After the restorations in St. Peter’s had been completed, the artisans began decorating table tops, cabinets, coffers and jewelry with scenes of Italy and images copied from ancient mosaics and Renaissance paintings. The Victorian upper classes loved anything that smacked of classical antiquity, and furniture set with Roman mosaics soon became a favorite, if pricey, souvenir for visiting Russian czars and wealthy English milords.

The furniture and jewelry in the exhibition constitute a tour de force of craftsmanship. Necklace medallions are set with delicate micromosaics that resemble petit point embroidery. Table tops inlaid with elaborate garlands of fruit and flowers rival the finest 18th-Century marquetry.

The large mosaic panels that suggest ersatz paintings are considerably less successful. It reportedly took Gioacchino Rinaldi more than five years to complete his 5-foot landscape, “The Ruins of Paestrum,” but the labor needed to assemble those millions of bits of glass overwhelm its artistic content. The viewer looks at it and thinks, “Well, he lived to finish it.”

The Florentine mosaics represent a different tradition that dates to the late 16th Century. Rather than fuss with tiny shards of glass, the craftsmen in the Medici workshops cut semi-precious stones into intricate pieces and fit them together like an opulent jigsaw puzzles. The resulting pietre dure, or hard-stone mosaics, recall the small figurines that the Faberge artisans made from the same materials: agate, onyx, colored marble, obsidian, quartz, jasper.

The Florentine mosaics are also most effective as decorations. The panels of landscapes with ruins set in an 18th-Century English cabinet suggest miniature Tiffany windows. The mottled colors of the stone evoke a cloudy sky or the leafy crown of a tree, the way Tiffany’s elaborately textured glass does.

Conversely, the attempts to use pietre dure techniques to simulate paintings veer perilously close to kitsch. “Two Little Tykes,” a self-conscious study of a small boy and his dog by Mario Montelatici, looks like an early-day Saturday Evening Post cover.

No antique buff or student of the decorative arts should miss “The Art of Mosaics,” which remains on display indefinitely. Like Faberge eggs, these tables and necklaces are products of a time when skilled labor was cheap and an apprentice artisan might spend a decade or more learning the secrets of his craft. No one could duplicate these pieces today, even with the most sophisticated computer technology.