The Mosaists: A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798310899063)

Venice, sixteenth century. Sébastien Zuccato - painter, teacher of the young Titian, a man of considerable local standing - has a problem: his sons Francesco and Valerio have abandoned painting for mosaic work. They are becoming the finest mosaicists in Venice, covering the interior of the Basilica of San Marco with work that will outlast everything painted on canvas. Their father considers this a disgrace.

Sébastien asks Tintoretto - Jacopo Robusti, the most formidable painter in Venice after Titian - to help him talk his sons out of it. Tintoretto declines. What follows is one of the most elegant aesthetic debates in French Romantic fiction: a defense of the mosaic artist's vocation against the hierarchy of arts that painters had imposed on the craftsmen who executed their visions, an argument for the intrinsic worth of a craft against the prestige bestowed on it by those powerful enough to grant or withhold approval.

George Sand wrote Les Maîtres Mosaïstes in 1837, in the aftermath of her Venice journey with Alfred de Musset and in the year she won legal separation from her husband Casimir Dudevant - recovering her property, her children's custody, and, in effect, the right to pursue her own work on her own terms. The question animating the novella - who decides what art is worth practicing, and on what authority - was not academic for her. The Zuccati brothers are based on real historical figures: Sebastiano Zuccato's sons Valerio and Francesco, who were Titian's lifelong friends and whose mosaics still cover the vaults of San Marco. Sand's novella was placed on the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum around 1840, alongside eleven of her other works. It also, according to her own correspondence, directly inspired the businessman Salviati to revive Venice's mosaic and glassware industries - the company he founded still operates today.

The Mosaists is a work about what it costs to defend an art that others have decided is beneath them, and about who turns out to be right.