International Mosaic Contest Pictor Imaginarius “L’arte del Mosaico”
Mosaic is a form of decorative art that was born and risen through the centuries in a thousand different forms, with a thousand different materials, in contexts and in distant continents; from the most ancient decorations with colored clay cones of the Mesopotamian area, to the inlays in archaic Egyptian hard stones, to the pebbled mosaics of the Balkan and Middle Eastern area, then to the Hellenistic and Roman world where mosaic becomes a form expressive in all areas: floors, walls, paintings, ceilings. But we must not forget in the Far East the Chinese masks made with hard stones cut and juxtaposed to each other, on the other hand very similar to the pre-Columbian ones found in central and South America. All this to say that painting and expressing with colored materials both natural and artificial has always been used in all ancient civilizations, even if not in contact with each other.