Pella

**An older technique than the familiar mosaic, and harder — and Pella is its summit.** ✅ **The difference**: **the mosaic you know** is made of **cut cubes** (tesserae) of marble or glass — **so the artist controls shape and colour completely**. ⚠ **A pebble mosaic is made of natural river pebbles** as found: **uncut and unshaped** — **so the artist is bound by what nature supplies** in size and colour (white, black, grey, red, yellow). ✅ **Why it is harder**: you must **build a precise image from a limited vocabulary** — choosing pebble by pebble, **setting orientation and size** to make a line or a shadow. ✅ **What Pella's artists did**: they added **strips of lead or clay** to draw outlines and fine detail — **achieving a sharpness impossible with pebbles alone** — **and graded their colours** to build volume, musculature and the folds of cloth. ⚠ **The result in the «lion hunt»**: **movement and anatomy** approaching painting. ✅ **Historically**: **tesserae replaced pebbles** shortly afterwards — **so Pella is both the technique's peak and its end**.