We are still at the “Artist’s Gallery”. Now we will visit the artists that did the Florentine mosaics that we saw in the Palace of Nowruz. For myself, I had never heard of Florentine mosaics before. It has evidently been an artistic endeavor since the end of the 15th century. My guess is that is started in Florence, Italy. My understanding is that there are still a few shops in Florence today that carry on the craft.

Florentine mosaics are unlike any other mosaic work, such as Byzantine or glass mosaics. With other mosaics, you can see the pieces and the spaces between clearly, that is how the pieces are done. With Florentine mosaics, cut pieces of stone are fit together in such a way that you can’t determine the pieces or spaces in the finished work. They are made up of many small pieces of semi-precious stone. These mosaics require incredible time and patience, not to mention finding all the perfect colors of stone. Each individual piece must be found, sized, carved, shaped, filed, measured and reworked until it meets the connecting pieces perfectly. It’s like creating a perfect puzzle that is not seen as a puzzle but as one piece of art.

You can see the artists in their shop in the first photo. We were shown work and talked with both the man on the left and the one in the center. The works on the walls are some of their work.

In the second photo, you can see the artist with his current piece of work. You can see the photo on the right and the Florentine mosaic on the work table in front of him. You might notice the paint brush to the left of the mosaic but we were assured that there is no paint used on any of the mosaics. The brush is just used to brush off the stone dust to clearly see that pieces are joined sufficiently tight. 100% of the mosaics are stones. They also told us that they use 100% Tajikistan stones, gathered from the mountains all around Tajikistan. Every color is a different stone or a different shade of the same stone.

The last three photos are mosaics on the walls of their studio. They had dozens of them and every single one of them was impressive. Sit and look at these mosaics for a bit of time and look closely at each line and piece of stone and it starts to sink in about just how much work and effort goes into making one of these Florentine mosaics.