1,700-year-old Roman Mosaic in Miami

 

At the FrostArt Museum at FIU in Miami, Florida, through May 15, 2016, is an opportunity to see an extraordinarily well-preserved 3rd century floor mosaic: Predators and Prey: A Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel. Adding to its interest value is that it holds an unresolved mystery:  Why are there no deities or human beings portrayed, among the menagerie of exotic animals? This is extremely rare for such a large floor mosaic from the time period.

The Lod Mosaic dates to when the town of Lod was a part of the Roman Empire. The amazingly detailed mosaic is thought to have been the floor of a large audience room, in a sumptuous villa owned by a Roman merchant whose trade route crossed between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean. The town of Lod stands on the site of the ancient city of Lydda, which developed in a fertile plain on an important trade route, the Via Maris, from Egypt to Syria and Mesopotamia. As this mosaic attests, it was a center of culture and craft production.

Archaeologists have calculated that more than two million tesserae (mosaic tiles) were used to create the 1,700-year-old masterwork. Three panels from the excavation are included in the exhibition, two rectangular end-panels surrounding a large square central medallion. Featured are indigenous animals coexisting with ferocious wild creatures such as lions and tigers (oh my!), an elephant and a giraffe, and Asian water buffalo, plus marine life, a sea monster and merchant ships.

Learn more about the Lod Mosaic at http://lodmosaic.org/home.html

Images © IsraelAntiquities Authority 

Magnificent Pagan Altar Unearthed in Israel

Workers on a hospital construction project in Ashkelon, Israel, have discovered an ancient pagan burial field dating to the Roman period of the 1st/2nd centuries CE (or AD, as I was taught in school).

Under the supervision of the Israel Antiquities Authority, numerous family and individual burial structures have been unearthed. One of the tombs contained a large limestone sarcophagus with a decorated lid, with an unusual interior pillow-effect where the stone at one end was left slightly raised in the spot where the head of the deceased was to rest.

Perhaps the most exciting find, though, is a magnificent pagan altar made of granite, decorated with bulls’ heads and laurel wreaths adorned with grape leaves and clusters of fruit. Although incense altars usually stood in Roman temples, this one stood in the center of the ancient burial field. It was used for burning incense, particularly myrrh and frankincense, while praying to the gods. The resulting burn marks remain visible, despite the altar having been buried for almost 2,000 years.

I wonder if building contractors in lands with long histories eventually become inured to archeological delays on their projects?

Architectural clues tell the story

Just back from Rome. Glad to be home, but ... ah, Rome.

I continue to be fascinated by the visual cues to its history ... if you just know what to look for.

One thing I'd never noticed before, something I think almost everyone misses, in the Piazza di Trevi:

When facing the fountain, one's back is to an enclosed medieval portico. But if you turn around and give it a careful look, the distinct lack of symmetry in the facade gives clues to its story.

The original open portico was built in the late 13th/early 14th century, functioning as a sheltered extension of the piazza. It was enclosed in the late 17th century because it was thought to constitute a public nuisance ... its shadowy recesses providing cover for unsavory types bent on committing unsavory acts.

The portico was built with materials pilfered/salvaged from ancient structures. Use of granite columns and Ionic capitals of different sizes meant that the short entablatures had to be set in at different heights. Because of the scale differences, the spacing between the columns is uneven.

As a result of a 17th C renovation, the windows of the apartments on the floors above are placed somewhat symmetrically in relation to each other -- but there was no way to line them up with the irregular colonnade below.

Nonetheless, despite this visual dissonance, flying in the face of all that is architecturally holy, the facade has a charming stability. It will be still standing long after I'm not!

Empire and Facial Hair

Here's another digression that is being edited out of the Jane's Smart Art audio guide to the Pantheon in Rome: a little art-historical note … about Roman Emperors' facial hair.

Their sculpted portraits tell us that, up until Hadrian’s time [117 - 138], Roman Emperors were clean-shaven. (Beards were worn until Alexander the Great made shaving fashionable, circa 300 BC.)

But Hadrian chose to wear a beard, perhaps in emulation of the Greek philosophers. His portraits evidence that he broke with clean-shaven tradition and, in so doing, he apparently established a new trend. Subsequent emperors were always portrayed sporting beards.

Thus, the presence or absence of a beard will cue you as to whether the Roman bust you are looking at is of the earlier or later Empire.

Julius Ceasar [d. 44BC]

Domitian [81 - 96 AD]

Trajan [98 - 117]

Hadrian [117 - 138]

Commodus [180 - 192]

Caracalla [211 - 217]

"Give us back our Apoxyomenos!"

I hate to have to edit this tidbit out of the script for my up-coming Jane's Smart Art audio guide to the Pantheon in Rome, but it's rather too much of a digression:

To celebrate their victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Emperor Octavian Augustus' good friend and son-in-law, Agrippa, built the first public baths of Rome. To supply his magnificent new baths, Agrippa constructed a 14-mile long aqueduct to bring to Rome the pure water of the Aqua Virgo.

Pliny tells us that Agrippa’s baths were splendid in design and materials, and that they were decorated with fine statues, including the famous bronze Apoxyomenos by Lysippus (Ly-SIP-us) -- a beautiful figure of an Athlete in the Bath. Lysippus was Alexander the Great’s court sculptor in the 4th C BC.

Apoxyomenos means "The Scraper". It is a Classical Greek artistic convention for representing an athlete, caught in the familiar act of scraping his body with the small curved metal instrument that the Romans called a strigil. In the days before soap, perfumed oil was applied to the skin and then the strigil was used to scrape it off, drawing the dirt and sweat from the body along with the oil.

Tiberius, who followed Octavian Augustus as Emperor, moved the bronze statue to his palace for his personal enjoyment. But -- even though he replaced it with a marble copy -- the figure was so popular that the public outcry, "Give us back our Apoxyomenos", forced him to return the original to its place in front of the Baths complex.

An ancient copy in Pentelic marble — quite possibly the one Tiberius tried to substitute — is now in the Vatican. The supporting tree trunk behind the left leg seen in the Roman marble copy was not in the bronze original, which has been lost.

Rare exhibition of 2000 yr old frescoes

Here's an exhibit not to miss if you can hie thyself to Madison WI between now and June 3rd, '07 ... Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite. The Chazen Museum of Art has mounted an extremely rare exhibition of 2000 year old frescoes that have never before this tour been seen in the US.

In the first centuries BC and AD, the sumptuous villas dotted all around the Bay of Naples served as summer residences for leisure and political entertaining . In the hot months Rome was empty of the rich and powerful, and the area surrounding the Bay of Naples became the virtual capital of the Empire.

The villas were designed to provide fabulous views of the Bay and also contained serene garden courtyards. According to ArtDaily.org , the exhibition features twenty-six remarkably well-preserved fresco wall paintings and eleven wall reliefs made of stucco among the more than seventy works of art and artifacts recovered from five partially-excavated ancient Roman villas located in Stabiae.

The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 a.d. destroyed a wide swath of populated territory, bringing an end to the area's era of affluence. But the thick layer of ash and pumice functioned exceptionally well as a preservative, and the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation has as its mission the excavation and conservation of at least two of the enormous villas and the transformation of the site into one of the largest archaeological parks in modern Europe. The site of Stabiae (Castellammare di Stabia) is 2.5 miles from Pompeii and is currently open to the public.

The four-year tour of this exhibition represents the first long-term loan of major cultural treasures from Italy to the U.S. After Madison, it will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (July 8 – October 7) and then to the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL (November 7- Feb 3, 2007/08).