It can be easy to get lost in the beauty of ancient paintings. The complexity, the color, and the shapes can be fascinating. However, it's even more incredible to learn that some of these are not paintings at all.
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Rather than creating images by adding pigment to a flat surface, some artists created patterns or shapes by arranging hundreds to thousands of tiny, colored tiles. We call this art form a mosaic, a decorated surface made up of individual pieces. It's a unique art form and one which can produce incredible results.
It is a beautiful art form, but where did it come from? From what we can tell, mosaics have been around for a very long time, perhaps as long as architecture itself. The oldest mosaics we've found date to the 3rd millennium BCE, in a temple in Mesopotamia. These ancient mosaics were made of stones, shells, and ivory, most of which were locally available products. It's worth noting that similar mosaics have been found in the Americas dating at least 250 CE (and possibly before) in the Maya civilization, where the art form was developed independently.
Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. The earliest known examples of mosaics made of different materials were found at a temple building in Ubaid, Mesopotamia, and are dated to the second half of 3nd millennium BCE. They consist of pieces of colored stones, shells and ivory.
Among the materials that have played and continued to play a role in the production of mosaic, ceramic is the most versatile. Terra-cotta &#;threads&#; were used in Greek mosaics as contours , and tesserae of the same material were frequently used by the Byzantines for the depiction of red objects and garments. Today, glazed or unglazed ceramic is used and is one of the strongest competitors with glass and stone. Ceramic tesserae are cut from tiles or, like much modern glass mosaic material such as pressed glass , come prefabricated. Prefabricated tesserae have the advantage of a very uniform and smooth surface which harmonizes with glass, steel, and other new building materials.
In Christian mosaics, tesserae of mother-of- pearl or coarse-grained marble cut to round or oblong shapes were used to depict pearl. Though pieces of semiprecious stones were among the mosaic materials of antiquity, their use was rarely dictated by the wish for particular sumptuous effects. Reduced to common tessera size, bits of this strongly coloured material served as part of the general colour scheme of the mosaic pictures. Objects like those of the pre-Columbian American Indian cultures , in which, because of its exquisite materials, such as turquoise and garnet, mosaic attained the status of jewelry have not been found in Western art.
In addition to this massive predilection for gold, the Christian East began to use silver to depict the symbolic light emanating from Christ. First, it was used for the entire disc of his halo, later only for the cross arms. The archangels were the only figures besides Christ for whom the silver halo was used. The light of God, appearing as rays from above in scenes of the Annunciation , Nativity , Baptism , and Transfiguration , was also depicted with silver tesserae. Finally, silver and gold were used together in Byzantine representations of the infant Jesus, whose golden robes are highlighted with silver cubes (the apse and south vestibule of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul; both 9th century).
An early instance of the use of gold for depicting light emanating from God is in a representation of Christ-Helios (Christ as the Sun God) in a 3rd-century mausoleum under St. Peter&#;s at Rome. Here, a few gold tesserae are seen in the rays coming from Christ&#;s head. The halo of gold, a feature so common in Christian art that religious pictures without it can hardly be imagined, developed in mosaic art in the 4th century ce. The gold background, signifying divine light, probably originated in Roman mosaic art, but the first preserved instances date from the advanced 4th century. The cupola mosaic of Áyios Geórgios at Thessaloníki (c. 400), for example, has a background of gold. In Italian mosaics of the 5th century, other types of background, such as a dark-blue ground or a more naturalistic landscape setting, were dominant. Only at the beginning of the 6th century did the gold background become the rule.
Gold cubes were distributed among the ordinary tesserae to add to the shimmer of light in ornaments and background details. To avoid an uneven gleam in the surface, the mirror effect was often moderated by setting the gold tesserae in reverse, so that the visible part of the cube is the side with the thickest sheet of glass covering the gold leaf . In the now-lost mosaics of the Church of the Dormition in Nicaea, a scholar observed another exquisite effect, which he called dark gold, created by cubes from which some of the gold leaf had been chipped off, for example, in the frontal part of Mary&#;s golden footstool (7th or 8th century ce).
Gold tesserae were first used by the Romans, in both floor and vault decoration of late antiquity. Initially, their role was simply to give a golden effect. Gold tesserae, for example, were employed to depict a golden wreath in a floor mosaic at Antioch (c. 300 ce) and gold vessels in some of the vault mosaics in Santa Costanza in Rome . Later, when this use of gold for imitation purposes had become more refined, some spectacular effects were produced in the depiction of garments. The Good Shepherd in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna (c. 450 ce) is dressed in golden robes of densely set gold cubes shaded with stripes of light-yellow tesserae. The female saints in Sant&#;Apollinare Nuovo (c. 550&#;570 ce) in the same town wear costumes set with green glass cubes among which appear both patterns and large fields of gold tesserae, producing a striking similarity to rich silk brocade. Silver was used in a similar way. Christ scenes in Sant&#;Apollinare Nuovo (500&#;526 ce) employ silver tesserae in the drawn sword of Peter in the betrayal, no doubt an imitation of steel. Silver tesserae are also found in the silver jug and basin in the scene of Pilate washing his hands.
With little knowledge of the laws of optics but with immense practical experience, mosaic makers of the Early Christian period gave the art a completely new direction with the exploitation of gold and silver glass tesserae. Like a mirror, the glass from which this kind of tesserae was made had a metal foil applied or, better, encased in it. The metal was gold leaf or, for the &#;silver,&#; probably tin. These pieces of mirror glass gave golden or white reflections of high intensity and could be used to depict objects of precious metal or to heighten the effect of other colours; but, above all, it was used as a means of rendering the light emanating from God.
Glass , which first appeared among the materials of mosaic in the Hellenistic period (3rd&#;1st century bce), brought unlimited colour possibilities to the art. In floors, however, it had to be used sparingly because of its brittleness. In floors, glass tesserae were used for the strongest hues of red, green, and blue, while softer tints were rendered with coloured stone. With the development of wall mosaic, glass largely took over the functions of stone, producing tints of unsurpassed intensity and leading to a continuing search for new coloristic effects.
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The most commonly used adhesive for mosaics was mortar, the function of which was in the 20th century largely taken over by modern, tougher kinds of cements or glue. In Roman floors, two to three layers of mortar preceded the setting bed that was to carry a tesserae facing. The first layer rested on a thick foundation of stone that prevented settling of the mortar bed and the formation of cracks. For wall mosaics the preparation was equally painstaking, and in many cases an application of a waterproofing of resin or tar preceded the laying of the mortar. There then followed two layers of coarse, roughened mortar, the stability of which was often improved by large nails that had been driven into the joints of the wall before the work of laying started. A third and final layer was of fine consistency and frequently, like the mortar for floor mosaics, contained powdered marble and binding elements such as pounded brick.
As in fresco painting (technique of using water-suspended pigments in a moist plaster surface), the setting bed was applied in patches never larger than were needed for one day&#;s work. In a frescoed surface, the breaks between the different stages of the work can easily be detected; they are harder to discover in mosaic.
Numerous underpaintings discovered in wall mosaics indicate that sketches, often detailed and with the main colours suggested, were executed on the setting bed to serve as guides for the disposition of the tesserae. Similar procedures are thought to have been part of the technique of floor mosaic. In church mosaics, rough preliminary sketches have been found on layers underneath the setting bed and, in a few instances, even on the brick wall itself. This kind of preparatory sketch, for which there are parallels in wall painting, suggests that the artist was trying out the overall scheme of the decoration before making a more detailed sketch on the setting bed.
Instead of laying the tesserae one by one directly onto the mortar, another method was sometimes used. In Pompeii many of the so-called emblēmata (central panels of floors), which were made up of smaller than average tesserae and were often of very high artistic quality, appear to have been preset on trays of stone or terra-cotta which were then embedded in the mortar of the floor. The surrounding mosaic area was then set according to the ordinary, direct method. Although the direct method was used for wall mosaics during the Middle Ages, there are signs in at least one medieval monument of a partial use of the prefabrication&#;or &#;indirect&#;&#;method: in the cupola mosaic of the church of Áyios Geórgios, Thessaloníki (c. 400), the heads of the saints seem to have been inserted in the mortar in one piece. The indirect method was the one most used in the 20th century. In the workshop, the mosaic is first set in reverse with glue on paper or cloth and then applied to the floor or wall. The technique permits preassembling of mosaics intended even for curved surfaces, cupolas, or apses. It has been hypothesized that behind the enormous output of floor mosaics in the Roman era lay similar production methods which had developed out of the tray procedure described above. The introduction of wall mosaics led to experimentation with the spacing and angling of tesserae. The solidity of floor mosaics depended on a close-set texture, but in wall mosaics, in which the element of wear was no longer relevant, the organization of the surface could become looser. For several centuries, a very wide spacing of the tesserae was cultivated, and the placing of cubes at irregular angles was regarded as important to the overall effect of wall mosaics. These tendencies reached the extreme in the 7th and 8th centuries, in mosaics of the chapel of San Venanzio in the Lateran Baptistery, Rome, and in the fragments of the decoration of Pope John VII (705&#;707 ce) in the old St. Peter&#;s in the Vatican. Later periods preferred a somewhat closer setting, but the irregular surface continued to be in fashion for most of the Middle Ages.
The tilting of tesserae became an art in itself. In 6th-century Byzantine mosaics there evolved a new technique whereby gold and silver tesserae were set at extremely sharp angles to enhance reflection. By pointing their mirror ends downward in the direction of the onlooker, it was possible to secure maximum light effect. In Hagia Sophia at Istanbul, the enormous gold areas in the wall mosaics of the emperor Justinian are set with cubes tilted this way. In one particularly dark corner, the tesserae are not only tilted downward but are also turned slightly sideways to catch the light from a nearby window. A similar technique, based on a high degree of tilting of the gold tesserae in unlit areas, can be observed in the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (c. 690 ce).
Haloes set with tilted cubes that bring out the circle of light surrounding the heads of holy figures became common in Byzantine mosaics of the 6th to 7th centuries, as is seen in the mosaic panels dating from this period in the church of Áyios Dhimítrios, Thessaloníki. Striking examples of such haloes are also found among mosaics that were put up in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul in the 9th century, above all in a panel with the kneeling emperor (Leo VI?).
Effects such as those described above are unthinkable without the accumulated experience of the craftsman-artist. In the 20th century, mosaic increasingly became an art divided between the inventor who furnished the design and the worker who executed it. It may be that the dry character of many modern mosaics can be ascribed to the fact that the artist no longer put his thumb on every tessera.
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