of the art are achieved. But inside of the palace are some two hundred
artisans at work,--cutting the smalts and glass into the minute fragments
of which the mosaics are made, grinding and smoothing these fragments,
polishing the completed works, and reproducing, with incredible patience
and skill, the lights and shadows of the pictures to be copied.

You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as
artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and long-
suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original life and
inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder mosaicists. Each
artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems of smalts already
mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments as he proceeds, he
inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive his picture, and
thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable work of the painter.

In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of
_marqueterie_,--table-tops, album-covers, paper-weights, brooches,
pins and the like,--and in others they are sawing the smalts and glass
into strips, and grinding the edges. Passing through yet another room,
where the finished mosaic-works--of course not the pictorial mosaics--are
polished by machinery, we enter the store-room, where the crowded shelves
display blocks of smalts and glass of endless variety of color. By far the
greater number of these colors are discoveries or improvements of the
venerable mosaicist Lorenzo Radi, who has found again the Byzantine
secrets of counterfeiting, in vitreous paste, aventurine (gold stone),
onyx, chalcedony, malachite, and other natural stones, and who has been
praised by the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice for producing mosaics even
more durable in tint and workmanship than those of the Byzantine artists.

In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition of