Roman mosaic

A Roman mosaic is a mosaic made during the Roman period, throughout the Roman Republic and later Empire. Mosaics were used in a variety of private and public buildings. They were highly influenced by earlier and contemporary Hellenistic Greek mosaics, and often included famous figures from history and mythology, such as Alexander the Great in the Alexander Mosaic. A large proportion of surviving examples come from Italian sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as other areas of the Roman Empire.

The Roman mosaics are made with small pieces of ceramic colors and shapes called tesserae, which is why they also refer to as opus tessellatum. The tiles are cubic shaped pieces, made of limestone or glass or ceramic, very neat and elaborate and of different sizes. The artist arranged them on the surface, like a puzzle, distributing the color and shape and agglomerated with a mass of mortar.

The Roman mosaic is considered a painting made of stone. It is an art that lives off of painting as far as subjects are concerned. The subjects of a mosaic have no identity of their own, they are the same as can be found in painting, but it differs from it in the fact that the perspective is false and forced. His inspiration is in the drawings of the tapestries of the fabrics and the pictorial work.

Roman mosaics are easy to discover for archaeologists that their number is very high, but they present a great difficulty of conservation. The ideal place seems to be in museums where care, cleanliness, temperature, humidity, etc., the problem is in the space that would be needed to store them deservedly.

History
At first, when the art of mosaic began to develop in Rome, it was done mainly to decorate ceilings or walls and rarely floors because it was feared that it would not offer enough resistance to footsteps. But later, when this art came to perfection, they discovered that it could be stepped on without risk and the fashion for making luxury pavements began. The mosaics as pavement were for the Romans as can be a Persian rug and of high quality in modern times.

When the Romans conquered the regions of Greece and Asia Minor throughout the second century BC, the mosaic work was already common throughout the Greek-speaking world. The art of mosaic passed easily in the Roman world and starting a genre artistic – industrial, which made a real specialty. It spread so that it can be said that there was no Roman house or villa where there were no mosaics.

Mosaics were for the Romans a decorative element for architectural spaces. It became such an appreciated and widespread art that in the third century the emperor Diocletian promulgated a decree in which he established the price that artists could give to their works, according to the degrees of previous qualification. When in 330 the emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire to Constantinople. the ancient Byzantium, granted quite facilities and favored the exodus to the Greek and Roman masters mosaic makers. Here the art of mosaic was united with the oriental tradition and gave rise to an evolution that was distinguished mainly by the very generalized use of great amounts of gold.

Development
The earliest examples of Roman mosaic flooring date to the late Republican period (2nd century BC) and are housed in Delos, Greece. Witts claims that tessellated pavements, using tesserae, were used in Europe from the late fifth to early fourth centuries BC. This is contradicted by Ruth Westgate, who contends that the earliest tessellated mosaics of the Hellenistic period date to the 3rd century BC, with the 2nd to early 1st-century BC mosaics of Delos constituting roughly half of the known examples. Hetty Joyce and Katherine M. D. Dunbabin concur with this assessment, asserting that the transition from pebble mosaics to more complex tessellated mosaics originated in Hellenistic-Greek Sicily during the 3rd century BC, developed at sites such as Morgantina and Syracuse. The earliest known pebble mosaics and use of chip pavement are found at Olynthus in Greece’s Chalcidice, dated to the 5th to 4th centuries BC, while other examples can be found at Pella, capital of Macedon, dated to the 4th century BC.

The earliest mosaics of Roman Pompeii, dated to the Pompeian First Style of wall painting in the late 2nd and early 1st centuries BC, were clearly derived from the Hellenistic Greek model. However, they contained far more figured scenes on average, less abstract design, the absence of lead strips, as well as an almost complete lack of complex, three-dimensional scenes utilizing polychromy until the Pompeian Second Style of wall painting (80-20 BC). The mosaics in the Villa Romana del Casale (c. 300 AD) from Roman Sicily perhaps represent the hallmark of mosaic art in the Late Imperial period. The mosaic decoration of the local palace complex culminates in the gallery, which contains a scene of animal hunting and fighting covering an area of 3,200 square feet (300 m2).

Technology
Roman mosaics are constructed from geometrical blocks called tesserae, placed together to create the shapes of figures, motifs and patterns. Materials for tesserae were obtained from local sources of natural stone, with the additions of cut brick, tile and pottery creating coloured shades of, predominantly, blue, black, red, white and yellow. Polychrome patterns were most common, but monochrome examples are known. Marble and glass were occasionally used as tesserae, as were small pebbles, and precious metals like gold. Mosaic decoration was not just confined to floors but featured on walls and vaults as well. Traces of guidelines have been found beneath some mosaics, either scored into or painted onto the mortar bedding. The design might also be pegged out in string, or mounted in a wooden frame.

The collapse of buildings in antiquity can, paradoxically, both irrevocably destroy mosaics or protect and preserve them.

Imagery
As well as geometric patterns and designs, Roman mosaics frequently depicted divine characters or mythological scenes.

Portraits
Imagery of famous individuals or entertaining scenes are common on Roman mosaics. The Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun, Pompeii depicts the Battle of Issus between Alexander the Great and Darius III. In addition to famous people from antiquity, mosaics can depict aspects of daily life. The Gladiator Mosaic from Rome depicts a fighting scene, naming each gladiator involved. A gladiatorial scene is also known from Leptis Magna.

Religion
One of the earliest depictions of Roman Christianity is a mosaic from Hinton St Mary (in Dorset, England) which shows Christ with a Chi-Rho behind his head. The mosaic is now in the British Museum. Orpheus mosaics, which often include many animals drawn by the god’s playing, are very common; he was also used in Early Christian art as a symbol for Christ. Scenes of Dionysus are another common subject.

Emblems
Progression within the mosaic technique developed the emblem, the “heart” of all mosaics. The word emblem is used to describe a small mosaic featuring a little genre scene or still life, characterised by particularly thin tesserae made separately and mounted in a central or important position in the main panel.

Types
Depending on the size of the tiles, the drawings and the destination of the mosaic, the Romans gave a different name to this work:

Opus vermiculatum, was of Egyptian originand was made of very small stones. With them the artist could easily draw curves, silhouettes and all sorts of objects that might require more precision. The tiles were placed in a continuous row that followed the lines of the outline and the surroundings (limit of the main internal parts) of the figures to be drawn. The name comes from the Latin diminutive vermiculus (from vermis-is, worm). They said so because the lines in the drawing reminded me of the sinuosities of the worm.
Opus musivum, which was made for the walls. This term began to be used at the end of the third century.
Opus sectile, the drawings were made of larger stones of different sizes. The technique was to cut marble slabs ofvarious colors to compose geometric figures, animal or human. It was a job very similar to the taracea. The best examples of this work are preserved in the Palatine of Rome and come from the Domus Flavia, on the Palatine Hill.
Opus signinum, from Sígnia (in the ancient region of Lazio). In this place there were tile factories, with the remains of which a colored powder was obtained which, when mixed with lime, gave avery hard and impermeable reddish cement. This product was widely used throughout Italy and the West to create floors and as a coating for swimming pools (fish ponds), salt pans, cisterns, etc. Sometimes, to give it more consistency, pebbles and chopped stones wereadded to the dough.

The mosaic as a pavement
The Romans also distinguished between the work of musivum (mosaic) and that of lithostrotum (λιθoστρωτoν), literally “stone pavement” in a general sense. It was called the pavement of a road or path, an open square or a forum, or the floor of a building (such as the Pantheon of Agrippa in Rome, made of porphyry). The work was given the name lithostrotum when the material consisted of natural stones of volcanic formation (flint) and marbles of different colors. The building blocks were polygonal.

The name of the work was given to the lithostrotum when the material consisted of natural stones of volcanic formation (flint) and marbles of different colors. The building blocks were polygonal.

To make a pavement made of mosaic they followed a series of steps that over time were perfected. The manufacturing site was a special workshop. There the first thing to do was to design the painting and this work took the name of emblem (word esdrúixola), voice taken from the Greek that comes to mean “something that is embedded in”. After designing the painting, a division was made according to the color. A papyrus template was then removedor in fabric of each one of these plots divided and on this template the tiles were put following the model chosen previously. The tiles were turned upside down, meaning the good face that would later look had to be glued to the insole. When this work was finished, the experts transported it in situ so that the artist could conclude his work there.

But before laying the tiles, the floor had to be well prepared to receive them. This was a very important task that required experience and skill. In the first place it was flattened until it was horizontal but with a gentle and calculated inclination that facilitated the sliding of the water towards the sinks. The floor had to be firm and stable, as a slight break of a single tile could lead to the degradation of the whole work. Scholars and archaeologists found a clear example of how this construction could be carried out in the famous mosaic of Alexander the Great found in the House of Fauna in Pompeii (Naples, Italy). The firm to finally receive the tiles was thus constituted (from bottom to top):

Conditioned natural soil
Mortar mixed with tile dust and charcoal
Fragments of tile
Mortar layer
Mosaic tiles