micromosaic

thumb|250px|Micromosaic brooch set in black glass, c. 1875, of the Pantheon, Rome|Pantheon thumb|250px|Byzantine mosaic icon, 45 cm high, 13th century. Micromosaics (or micro mosaics, micro-mosaics) are a special form of mosaic that uses unusually small mosaic pieces (tesserae) of glass, or in later Italian pieces an enamel-like material, to make small figurative images. Surviving ancient Roman mosaics include some very finely worked panels using very small tesserae, especially from Pompeii, but only from Byzantine art are there mosaic icons in micromosaic with tesserae as small as the best from the Modern period. Byzantine examples, which are very rare, were religious icons. They are usually framed and treated like portable paintings.

==Byzantine survivals== Byzantine micromosaics, usually all attributed to Constantinople, apparently all or nearly all come from the Late Byzantine period, from around 1300 until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The best known shows the Twelve Great Feasts of the Greek Orthodox Church and is in the Bargello in Florence. It is said to have been given to the Florence Baptistry in 1394 by the widow of a Byzantine court official. Another is in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome and was crucial in developing the iconography of the Man of Sorrows in the West; it was believed to be an original image from the time of Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century, but is now dated to around 1300 in Constantinople.