I feared this one wouldn't get out right, as the florentine mosaics are quite life-like if done well.

If you go to Florence, visit the Opificio delle Pietre dure (near the Uffizi museum). Just do it, you will tank me later: I went out of there crawling on all four, in full Stendhal syndrome.

... That's a sensory overload due to too much wonderful art, if you didn't know.

So, what they make there from reinassence is this: they take semi-precious stones, they slice those, they choose the fragments to shape (veins in the rock, texture, gradients, hues...) and they make perfect inlay mosaics reproducing with an absurd level of detail anything: birds, flowers, sceneries, people...

I was quite uncertain about the epoch, in the end I went with the one with a more pronounced marble effect for now.