- Title: Inside the studio that preserves the mosaics of St Peter's Basilica
- Date: 24th February 2026
- Summary: VATICAN CITY (FEBRUARY 19, 2026) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) VATICAN MOSAIC STUDIO DIRECTOR, PAOLO DI BUONO, SAYING: "At the beginning of the 19th century, actually, the Basilica of Saint Paul's was almost completely destroyed by a big fire. So after the fire, Pope (Pius) IX decided to create all the portraits of the Pope made in mosaic techniques." VARIOUS OF ARTIST C
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- Keywords: ART MOSAICS POPE LEO ST PETER'S BASILICA VATICAN CITY WORKSHOP
- Location: VATICAN CITY AND ROME, ITALY
- City: VATICAN CITY AND ROME, ITALY
- Country: Vatican City
- Topics: Art,Arts/Culture/Entertainment,Europe
- Reuters ID: LVA004771623022026RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text:Within the walls of Vatican City, since the late 1500s, a small workshop of highly trained artisans has cared for the hundreds of mosaics that decorate the interior of St. Peter's Basilica, while also creating new masterpieces.
Crafting a single mosaic can take months, as the 12 artists on staff at the Vatican Mosaic Studio meticulously assemble tiny coloured tiles into devotional items like depictions of Jesus and Mary or non-religious scenes such as views of Rome's Colosseum.
One of the studio's most recent productions was a 4.5‑foot‑tall portrait of Pope Leo, which was installed at Rome's Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in keeping with a tradition dating back to the 19th century.
The image, produced by a team of three people over five months, contains some 16,000 individual tiles. To better capture the shading of the pope’s skin, the artists turned to their historic archive, a catalogue of some 27,000 varieties of coloured tiles, stored in a 9,000‑drawer file cabinet spanning two floors.
About 23,000 of the tiles are artefacts - stockpiles of colours from past centuries that can no longer be produced and will one day be exhausted. Some of them were created with poisonous materials that are no longer used today.
The studio also crafts smaller mosaics that popes use for a kind of "mosaic diplomacy", gifting them to foreign leaders visiting the Vatican or on their trips overseas.
Adriano Galise, one of the studio's artisans, proudly displayed photographs of works he created being presented by the late Pope Benedict XVI to U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during official visits to the Vatican.
Unlike photographs or AI‑generated images, the mosaics produced in the workshop are not easy to create, but they are also not easy to lose. "It is something made to resist for centuries," Paolo Di Buono, the studio's director, told Reuters.
(Production: Gabriele Pileri, Joshua McElwee, Matteo Negri) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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