1950s Florentine Oval Micro selling Mosaic Bouquet Brooch

1950s Florentine Micro Mosaic Brooch.
A bouquet of flowers on a red base.
This brooch is comprised of a background of red tiles
with a raised stylised floral bouquet of ceramic slices
wth a gold tone frame.
It is quite different from the usual Micro Mosaic pieces.
This is a good example of a souvenir or tourist piece from the 1950s selling.
Even these later pieces are very rare these days.
This example is in wonderful antique condition
and measures 1 3/8 inches across by 1 1/8 inches high.

There are several types of Italian mosaics: Venetian, Roman and Florentine.
In Venetian designs, the artisans used a wide variety of shapes in the glass tiles to form the design.
In the Roman design very tiny pieces of colored glass, call tesserae, were pieced together to form a picture, and were held in place with cement in a glass or stone background.
In the Florentine design pietra dura (literally, “hard stone”) were cut, shaped and fitted together, somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle to produce a picture. These normally used a bed of black marble as the foundation so they have a black background. Florentine designs normally used larger tiles.