What do mosaics represent

Roman mosaics were made mostly of finger-nail size stones, many of which were naturally colored. By contrast Byzantine mosaics were made with teensy-weensy tiles, and often contained a lot of gold and precious and semi-precious stones.

To make a Roman mosaic: 1 A base was created with layered pieces of wooden planks, cut hay, porcelain, gravel, clay and mortar; 2 plasters was applied to the surface.

Large tiles or flat stones were placed around the edge of the mosaic. The designs were usually drawn on the surface. Skilled mosaic artists learned their crafts at schools in Tunis and Alexandria. They often carried mosaic books to help their clients chose what patterns and designs they wanted. Sometimes they worked alone. Other times they worked with a team for a year or more. Paul's within the Walls on via nazionale at via Napolu, down from Stazione Termini.

To create a Byzantine-style wall mosaic, Princeton University professor Kurt Weitzmann said, "a master artist, advised by a learned cleric concerning the theoretical accuracy of the subject matter, first sketched an entire scene. Assistants helped to design a series of cartoons; they determined the preliminary lines to be drawn on the wet plaster. Then in descending order of ability, the best mosaicists executed the heads of the figures, others filled in the details such as draped backgrounds, and still others the plain background.

Since successful workshops depended on long traditions and complex skills, only great artistic centers could maintain them. For centuries Constantinople dominated the world of mosaic art. Many mosaics are made from stone cubes about the size of dice.

Herbert Kessler of John Hopkins wrote in Smithsonian: ""Course plaster laden with straw was troweled into the wall and over it; a smoother coat was spread in areas just large enough to finish before the bed hardened. Designs from carefully prepared cartoons were transferred to the wet surface, and them finally, the master mosaicists worked their magic creating flesh, cloth and feathers from stone and precious metals, and torrents of rain, smoke and sky from marble and glass.

In some passages they used subtle tonalities to produce a subdued effects; elsewhere, they animated the surfaces with splashes of yellow, red and green. Throughout their comprehensive pictogram of decoration, however artistry and technical virtuosity knit an infinitely complex design into a cohesive whole. As Serat and the Pointillists later discovered, mosaic images made with fragments of pure color radiated power and intensity when viewed at the proper distance.

This effect was intensified in Byzantine mosaics which were often made of highly reflective colored glass. Pompeii Nilotic scene. The images found Roman mosaics ranged from simple geometric designs to breathtaking complex picture. Some are amazing realistic.

A mosaic from Pompeii showing Alexander the Great battling the Persians was made from 1. Typical Roman mosaics contained battles scenes with charging cavalries, mythical scenes with romping gods and goddesses, accompanied by nymphs and satyr, still-lifes of seashells, nuts, fruit vegetables and advancing mice and gladiators.

Mosaics uncovered at a year-old Roman villa near the Sicilian town of Piazza Armerina showed women in bikinis exercising with dumbbells. In Pompeii "beware of dog" signs were turned into elaborate mosaics. Many scholars believe the best mosaics were made in the provinces of North Africa. Portrait of Neptune, made by an anonymous artist in the 2nd century A. The mosaic depicting Alexander the Great's defeat of the Persian king Darius, now in the Naples Museum, is one of the most famous ancient mosaics.

It was discovered in the largest house in Pompeii, the House of the Faun, in a room overlooking the central peristyle garden of the house. It is thought that this house was built shortly after the Roman conquest of Pompeii, and is likely to have been the residence of one of Pompeii's new, Roman, ruling class.

The mosaic highlights the wealth and power of the occupier of the house, since such grand and elaborate mosaics are extremely rare, both in Pompeii and in the wider Roman world. In , the Getty Villa museum in Los Angeles hosted an exhibition of mosaics in which an overarching theme seemed to be bloody violence.

The beasts turn, growl and gnash their teeth. Another displays the moment when a muscled and victorious boxer, having just taken out his equally muscled human opponent, lays flat a great horned bull — just in case anyone doubted his superior strength and power. A gash by the staggered bull's eye tells the tale, echoing the blood running from the vanquished boxer's head. The cat's big claws make a gory mess of things.

The onager swivels his anguished head and meets the lion's ferocious gaze, while blood streams on the ground in a cluster of zigzag lines like jagged bolts of lightning. Is it any wonder Roman soldiers applied the name onager to the mechanical catapult they used for besieging walled compounds?

The recoil when the war machine was sprung reminded them of the wild beast's violent kick. A couple were designed for more public sites, such as the baths that were part of regular leisure rituals and social contact.

Mural-painted walls are one thing, but a durable stone floor is quite another. A mosaic, composed of thousands of small bits of hand-set stone and glass, is not easy to make. Nor is it inexpensive, nor easy to change. Gladiators from the Zliten mosaic. The remainder of the mosaic is in Naples' National Archaeological Museum. Tesserae — flat, irregularly shaped stone bits — are pieced together in shades of white, gray, pink, purple, ochre, umber and black to create a surprisingly nuanced drawing.

There are also laurel festoons, various animals real and imaginary , assorted fruits, some cupids and sizable ornamental heads backed by elaborate acanthus leaves at the corners, perhaps personifications of the four seasons. The fierce bear hunt is woven into cycles of nature and rituals of culture, all as lavish decoration.

They have triumphed over life's harsh vicissitudes. Images of conflict are metaphors for the battles they or their families fought, and not just militarily, to get where they are. Put under foot, they adorn the very foundation of things. Perhaps the most viscerally stunning mosaic is on the catalog's cover — a delicately colored head of the Gorgon Medusa, she with the hairdo of writhing snakes.

The monster could turn an enemy to stone with just a glance. The circular design is like a shield. Even severed, Medusa's head was a weapon. The chic mosaic is gorgeous. Mosaic from Tunisia's Bardo Museum. Describing an A. The river itself is symbolized by an elderly yet muscular man sitting across from her.

Athena looks vaguely unhappy, perhaps because the constant playing, which involved using her mouth as a kind of bagpipe, has distorted the shape of her lips In the ancient mythological tale, she threw the instrument on the ground in anger. The satyr Marsyas, depicted in the right-hand corner of this mosaic, picked it up and challenged Apollo to a competition. Infuriated by his arrogance, Apollo had Marsyas flayed. Rabbits eagerly nibble grapes, and ferocious lions devour their prey.

The panoply of tales told in stone sheds some light on how a wealthy Roman elite lived in North Africa between the second and sixth centuries. Despite the obsessive focus on Rome, experts say, the mosaics were also molded by the African experience. They were more colorful and exuberant than other mosaics of that period because of the stones in the area, Ms. Kondoleon said. If North Africans were eager to show off their knowledge of Rome, there was a highly practical incentive. Cities that complied most admirably were treated as colonies, which meant that their denizens had the same rights as Roman citizens.

A third-century mosaic depicting two lions ferociously tearing apart a boar was found in the dining room of a home in El Jem, inland in southern Tunisia. That same room also revealed a nine-foot-long floor portrait of a procession with Bacchus as its centerpiece.

In Roman mythology, Bacchus, the god of wine and fertility, was thought capable of subduing the forces of nature and wild animals. The lions devouring the boar have fierce paws but somewhat human faces, characteristic of animals in mosaics from that part of the world.

Kris Kelly, a senior curator at the Getty, said that North African mosaics tended to be more colorful than those from other parts of the Roman Empire because the terrain yielded a wider variety of colored stones and glass.

A 5-byfoot mosaic of Neptune driving two horses while holding his trident was found in in the coastal city of Sousse; an imposing head of Oceanus, with lobster claws darting from his hair and dolphins swimming out of his beard, was discovered in in the baths of Chott Merien, another Mediterranean port.

Unlike Byzantine mosaics which were put on walls and made of teensy-weensy tiles, Roman mosaics were placed on floors and made of finger-nail size stones, many of which are naturally colored. The mosaics at the museum in Antakya were taken from villas owned by wealthy merchants.

The art became so developed here that a mosaic school was opened. More than mosaics are on display. Some depict everyday Roman life and scenes from mythology. Others feature geometric designs or natural patterns. One if the most famous mosaics at the museum, from the A. The heads are surrounded by colorful fish and cherubs. Other impressive mosaic images include Clytemnestra beckoning her daughter Iphigenia; a drunken Dionysus helping a satyr; Hercules with head of an adult and the body of an infant; and an evil eye being attacked by a scorpion.

The mosaics are in good condition and survived the earthquakes because they were on the floor. The largest is square feet and can be observed from a balcony. The scenes from daily life have helped historians grasp what life was like in Roman times. As the art developed, smaller and smaller pebbles were used, and they were cut into finer and finer shapes. The shading on some of these works is amazing. You get a sense of perspective and expression. These are some of the finest artistic quality works of all antiquity.

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