At the V&A East Storehouse, Luigi Moglia’s 18th-century glass micromosaic The Pantheon represents the elite craftsmanship of Italian artists.
By the 1800s, Rome had lived many different lives as a city – it had undergone many wars, empires and renaissances while becoming a living museum of all of its past forms.
Mirroring this microcosm of life within his city, Luigi Moglia created The Pantheon, depicting Rome in the 19th century using small pieces of glass cut together to create a micromosaic.
His work, using tiny pieces of a material to form a bigger image, showcases how all the pieces of Rome’s past have created the city that it has become.
With the Pantheon building centralised and more modern buildings surrounding it, the viewer can easily see how different parts of the city’s history have impacted its current state and cemented it as one of the most important cities in the world.
Luigi Moglia was an Italian mosaicist with an expertise in micromosaics. He worked in the Studio Vaticano del Mosaico, which was a prestigious institution which aimed to replace the paintings in St. Peter’s Basilica with mosaics.
Moglia specifically worked with micromosaics in which the technique imitated painting through the carefully placed tiny, shaped tiles.
The origin of these specific mosaics began in the late 18th century in Italy, but the history of mosaics goes back thousands of years. The term micromosaic specifically refers to the technique of producing mosaics in miniature born during the Neoclassical Age.
[V&A Collections]
The tesserae are the small, hand-cut pieces of either stone, glass or some other material used to create this mosaic art. Some of the finest micromosaic pieces consist of as many as 5,000 tesserae per square inch. Rome was the centrepiece of the creation of many of these pieces, being sold as souvenirs to wealthy foreigners visiting.
Given the complexity of the artwork itself and the painstaking effort that goes into creating each work, the pieces have become extremely rare and sought after. When Albert Gilbert mistook the first micromosaic that he saw for a painting, the trajectory of this type of art changed.
The British-born American real estate developer is the person we have to thank for not only the popularity of these kinds of pieces but also the term ‘micromosaic’ itself.
When Gilbert first came across a picture of the Roman god Bacchus compiled of thousands of tiny pieces of glass, he became fascinated with this type of art. He later coined the term ‘micromosaic’ to describe art like this, which is composed of small pieces of glass to create a larger image.
After his first encounter with the piece in 1971, he devoted much of the rest of his life to collecting these pieces, before donating them to the Victoria and Albert Museum shortly before his death, including The Pantheon.
Featured image courtesy of V&A Collections.