Of course, the first proceeding is to prepare a design on a small scale, which shall embrace your notions of color only.  Then follows a full-sized cartoon, which I need hardly add shall embrace your best efforts in drawing.  A tracing is made of the latter and transferred to sheets of cardboard.  This cardboard is cut to the size of certain sections of your design, and, for convenience, should not be more than, say, 20 in. square.  Of course, it will not always be square, but will bear the same relation to your complete cartoon as a map of the counties would to that of all England.  Now, working from the small design (of color), the tesserae are cut to the forms required, laid face downward, and glued on to the cardboard sections containing your enlarged cartoon.  When the design is all worked out on these sections they are ready for fixing on walls or floor by laying them home on a float of cement.  When the cement sets, the cardboard sticking to the face is washed off, and the joints of tesserae flushed over with cement and cleaned off, leaving all joints filled up level.

There are other processes used for the same end.  The technical processes need not occupy our attention at present.  There is one process that may appeal to you, and that is executing the work in situ by floating on a limited expanse of cement, and sticking on the tesserae at once.  It has the advantage of enabling the artist or architect to see the effect of his efforts under the fixed conditions of light and height.

I shall confine myself to vitreous or glass mosaic, which for durability, extended scales of primary colors and their numerous semi-transparent gradations is unequaled by any substance yet used for wall or floor decoration.  I am surprised, having all these fine qualities, it is not more used by architects.  If you require proofs of its triumphs, go to St. Mark’s, of Venice, and stand under its mellow golden roof.  There you will find its domes and vaulted aisles, nave and transepts entirely overlaid with gold mosaic, into which ground is worked—­in the deepest and richest colors and their gradations that contemporary manufacturers could produce—­subjects selected from the creation down to the life of Christ, in addition containing a complete alphabet of early Christian symbolism.  The roof surfaces being one succession of over-arching curves become receptive of innumerable waves of light and broad unities of soft shadows, giving the whole an incomparable quality of tone and low juicy color.

Never use your gold but on curved or undulating surfaces.  Flat planes of gold only give the effect of a monotonous metallic yellow, and can never be beautiful, owing to the absence of the variations that come with waves of shadow.  By letting out the reins of imagination we might feel that in this a tenth century Giorgione has given off the mental impressions of all the golden autumn of his life.  His material gave him an advantage over his great followers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, insomuch that glass has a living and glowing quality of light not existing in the somewhat clouded purity of oil or fresco.