All this is true of Mikhail Lomonsov, and his impressiveness doesn’t stop there. Born in the eighteenth century, he was the man who brought coloured glass to Russia. He was a poet, a scientist, and he established the rules of the literary Russian language. Plus he discovered that Venus had an atmosphere.

While he was spending time in prison – a consequence of his bad temper — he didn’t laze about.  He wrote  ‘276 Notes on Corpuscular Philosophy and Physics’ which summed up most of his big scientific ideas. A humanitarian, he wanted changes to the system of serfdom — although what he wrote on that subject was censored. Towards the end of his life, he was persecuted. Once dead, the state rehabilitated him and suppressed anything he wrote they didn’t like.

In his laboratory, he made glass, and set up a coloured glass works. Forty of his mosaics are known, of which twenty survive. Here are some details of one of them. This is a model of a mosaicist to which we can only aspire.