The composition showing two birds perched on a bowl was favoured by the Raffaelli workshop, one version of which is inscribed on the reverse: Giacomo Raffaelli fece Roma 1792.

Writing in 1820, Charlotte Eaton (1788 1859) observed: all the streets leading to the Piazza di Spagna are lined with the shops of these Mosaicisti. The micromosaic plaques on display were generally unmounted, retailed in red leather fitted cases, so that the purchaser was free to choose the form and style of the supporting snuffbox. Many tourists had this work done by their goldsmiths once they had returned home – the present plaque, for example, was mounted in Stockholm sometime after the plaque itself was made.

Apart from selling to tourists, the Roman mosaicists also supplied foreign goldsmiths. Visiting the studio of Filippo Puglieschi, the archaeologist and writer Giuseppe Antonio Guattani (1748–1830) noted una splendida commissione proviente dal Nord di. num. 450 pizza in genre di collane, spille, anelli, pendenti, tabacchiere, etc. The number of snuffboxes with micromosaics made in Paris in the years 1809–1819 by goldsmiths such as Augustin André Héguin suggests that the plaques were ordered in quantity from Rome; the same observation is true for London when considering the work of Alexander James Strachan in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Finally, while it is conceivable that the snuffboxes set with micromosaic plaques in the workshop of Jean François Bautte in Geneva were the result of special commissions, it is also possible that Bautte imported the plaques to use for his own creations.

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