Orsoni_smalti

Smalti colour cards

We have given our smalti stock a good face lift and we invite you to feast with us in this wonderful material! We aim to be YOUR UK partner in everything that has got do with Orsoni’s products be it translucent smalti, regular smalti, gold leaf smalti or roti (off cuts from the smalti production). Please see below for the full factory range. As an introductory offer we charge the same price pr. 100 g as had you ordered by the kg. If you want to order 1 kg of a colour you just choose 10 x 100 g. Great prices for everybody.

Smalti from Orsoni is the most wonderful, vibrantly coloured top quality product for making mosaics. It is mosaic artist’s absolute favorite for it’s unique beauty; hand made in Venice using recipes and techniques unchanged since the 5th Century where smalti was used in the famous church mosaics of Ravenna, the world’s capital of mosaics. Smalti means ‘melt’ and is made when pigmented glass is melted in a cauldron. The hot glass mass is poured onto a metal plate and pressed out to resemble a pizza. When cooled, this material is cut by hand into briquettes, all individual in exact size and shape due to the nature of the glass and the by hand manufacturing. The off cuts from this production is sold as roti, which means literally ‘broken’. The roti will still have the excellent depth in colour as smalti is renowned and the irregular shapes are very interesting to work with.
The smalti tesserae are richly coloured, and the factory produces a huge range of different colours. Any shiny rippled side, usually with tiny little air pockets trapped in the glass, is the ‘up’ side in your mosaic. Due to the production methods, smalti is exclusive and rather expensive and can be used to great effect solely or in combination with other material.
The colour card about shows the full standard range.