Mosaics offer a vivid picture of ancient Roman life.
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From dramatic athletic contests to tender portraits of local wildlife, mosaics provide a glimpse at who the Romans were, what they valued, and where they walked.
Exhibition curator Alexis Belis, author of Roman Mosaics in the J. Paul Getty Museum, walked me through some of her favorite facts about mosaics, as well as a few can’t-miss objects in the exhibition.
1. Roman mosaics were meant to be walked on.
Paintings covered the interior walls of Roman villas, but weren’t practical for decorating floors. Enter mosaics: a durable and lavish way to spruce up a room and support foot traffic at the same time.
2. They’re interactive.
Mosaics are designed to be seen from different angles and to change as your perspective moves. A mosaic from LACMA’s collection sports a hunting scene around the border, encouraging you to walk around and look again.
3. The Romans perfected mosaics as an art form.
The Greeks refined the art of figural mosaics by embedding pebbles in mortar. The Romans took the art form to the next level by using tesserae (cubes of stone, ceramic, or glass) to form intricate, colorful designs.
4. Mosaics are full of drama and violence.
Action scenes, violent hunts, exotic creatures, and angsty mythological episodes are all frequent subjects on mosaics. The dramatic scene below, for example, shows a lion sinking its fangs into the haunch of a fleeing bull.
Mosaic of a Lion Chasing a Bull, 400s–500s A.D., Roman, made in Syria. Stone tesserae, 32 × 59 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 75.AH.115
5. Mosaics were symbols of wealth and status.
Blending art and home décor, Roman mosaics were commissioned to adorn and impress guests inside private homes and villas. Wealthy Romans chose themes to reflect their status: mythological stories would show off a man’s book learning, while scenes of wild animals being captured for fights in the arena might highlight his sponsorship of public games.
6. To get special colors, mosaic artists used glass and imported stones.
Mosaic artisans relied on local stones for the bulk of their work, but imported unusual colors for special highlights. When no stone would do, they turned to glass in bright colors like blue and green.
Mosaic of a Lion Attacking an Onager (detail), late 100s AD, Roman. Stone and glass tesserae, 38 3/4 × 63 in. Getty Museum, 73.AH.75
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7. They’re as brightly colored now as they were 2,000 years ago.
Mosaics are made of stone and glass, which fade hardly at all.
8. The most detailed Roman mosaics use small stones to achieve an effect like brushstrokes.
Especially in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, artists “painted” with stone, using small, vivid tesserae that resemble Pointillist daubs of pigment. (See the image at the top of this post.)
9. Mosaics tell us about ancient history.
Mosaics are significant not only as art, but as evidence of where and how people lived, worked, and thought. The locations and architectural settings of many mosaics have been recorded over the centuries by archaeologists, helping illuminate their cultural context.
Mosaic Floor with Animals, Roman, made in Antioch, Syria (present-day Antakya, Turkey). Stone tesserae, 101 1/4 × 268 5/8 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 70.AH.96
10. Many mosaics lay under the soil for thousands of years.
Because they are built into the foundations of buildings, mosaics are among the best-preserved of all forms of Roman art. Frescoes were knocked down and bronze sculptures melted for reuse, but countryside ruins often sat undisturbed for centuries under layers of soil and vegetation.
11. The Romans sometimes redecorated, adding new mosaics on top of old ones.
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The Roman rich weren’t so different from those today—they liked to update. This mosaic of the Medusa was found on top of another mosaic of a marine scene. Instead of demoing the original floor, the contractors just put the new one on top.
Mosaic Floor with a Bear Hunt (detail), 300–400 A.D., Roman, from near Baiae, Italy. Stone tesserae, 51–68 1/2 × 34 1/2–58 ¼ in. The J. Paul Getty Museum. 72.AH.76
This mosaic is on view outside the exhibition galleries, in the lobby of the Getty Villa Auditorium.
12. Where the Romans went, so did mosaics.
The spread of mosaics parallels the vast spread of Roman power, from France to Syria to Tunisia. And like the rest of Roman culture, mosaics in different places reveal a combination of local traditions and Roman influence.
13. Just like music and fashion today, mosaic styles had their fads.
In Italy and Gaul (France) in the first century A.D., black and white mosaics came into style—and no one is really sure why. Cost savings? Not likely, since the style makes an appearance at the villa of Roman emperor Hadrian, who could afford the best of the best.
14. Thousands of mosaics still dot the landscape in the Mediterranean Region and North Africa.
Partners in the international MOSAIKON initiative are working to improve the conservation, presentation, and management of these mosaics, many of which are still in situ (in their original archaeological locations).
15. Mosaic artists had different styles, which you can see if you look closely. Large mosaics were a massive undertaking, requiring the hands of more than one expert. If you look closely at the Bear Hunt Mosaic in Roman Mosaics across the Empire you can see an example: the two faces in the far right corners have different styles, colors, and quality, revealing that different hands made them.
Technical insight is the key to both the creation and the appreciation of mosaic, and the technical aspects of the art require special emphasis. There are also significant stylistic, religious, and cultural aspects of mosaic, which has played an important role in Western art and has appeared in other cultures . Although mosaic is an art form that appears in widely separated places and at different times in history, in only one place—Byzantium—and at one time—4th to 14th centuries—did it rise to become the leading pictorial art.
mosaic , in art , decoration of a surface with designs made up of closely set, usually variously coloured, small pieces of material such as stone , mineral , glass , tile , or shell. Unlike inlay , in which the pieces to be applied are set into a surface that has been hollowed out to receive the design, mosaic pieces are applied onto a surface that has been prepared with an adhesive. Mosaic also differs from inlay in the size of its components. Mosaic pieces are anonymous fractions of the design and rarely have the dimensions of pieces for intarsia work (fitted inlay usually of wood), whose function is often the rendering of a whole portion of a figure or pattern. Once disassembled, a mosaic cannot be reassembled on the basis of the form of its individual pieces.
Between mosaic and painting, the art with which it has most in common, there has been a reciprocal influence of varying intensity. In colour and style the earliest known Greek figurative mosaics with representational motifs, which date from the end of the 5th century bce, resemble contemporary vase painting, especially in their outline drawing and use of very dark backgrounds. The mosaics of the 4th century tended to copy the style of wall paintings, as is seen in the introduction of a strip of ground below the figures, of shading, and of other manifestations of a preoccupation with pictorial space. In late Hellenistic times there evolved a type of mosaic whose colour gradations and delicate shading techniques suggest an attempt at exact reproduction of qualities typical of the art of painting.
In Roman imperial times, however, an important change occurred when mosaic gradually developed its own aesthetic laws. Still basically a medium used for floors, its new rules of composition were governed by a conception of perspective and choice of viewpoint different from those of wall decoration. Equally important was a simplification of form brought about by the demand for more expeditious production methods. In the same period, the increasing use of more strongly coloured materials also stimulated the growing autonomy of mosaic from painting. As a means of covering walls and vaults, mosaic finally realized its full potentialities for striking and suggestive distance effects, which surpass those of painting.
The general trend towards stylization—that is, reduction to two-dimensionality—in late antique Roman painting (3rd and 4th centuries ce) may have been stimulated by experimentation with colour in mosaic and particularly by the elimination of many middle tones for the sake of greater brilliance. The central role played at that time by mosaic in church decoration, for which it is particularly well suited, encourages the assumption that the roles had shifted and painting had come under its influence. The strong, sinuous outlines and the absence of shading that came to characterize painting during certain periods of Byzantine and western European art of the Middle Ages may have originated in mosaic technique and use of materials. It is notable, however, that from the Renaissance to the 20th century mosaic was again wholly dependent on painting and its particular forms of illusionism.
In modern mosaic practice, the main tendency is to build on the unique and inimitable qualities of the medium. Although not a few of the works created in the 20th century reveal the influence of painting, figurative or abstract, the art came a long way toward self-realization. By and large the modern mosaic makers share with their medieval predecessors the conviction that there are functions to which the materials of mosaic lend themselves with particular appropriateness.
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