<--Continued from Part 1

Carpets of Stone
The Graeco-Roman Legacy in the Levant [Part 2]

Claudine Dauphin[1]

Between the two geometries

Besides the emblema used in large rooms, Roman mosaicists laid smaller floors, usually bearing geometric patterns, notably in the corridors and passages of large Roman houses. These consisted of linked forms such as circles, squares, rhomboids, and other geometric forms, creating a regular but variegated floor pattern. These geometric floors served as 'stone carpets' as is clear from private houses excavated in Herodian Jerusalem.[8] The pressure of work and the increasing number of commissions for large mosaic pavements at a time of economic expansion between the fourth century and the sixth century, led to a tendency for the geometric pattern to be used even in large rooms for which at an earlier period only an emblema would have been considered suitable.

The geometric design was conveniently capable of extension in any direction without producing imbalance. The emblema on the other hand was more difficult to extend should the enlargement not be equal on all four sides of the pavement. The monotony of these extensive geometric designs was relieved by the insertion into square or round frames of large busts and figures, as in the Frigidarium of Soteria in the Baths of Apolausis of AD 350 at Antioch. In the course of the fourth century there developed a tendency to dispense entirely with the geometric framework and to show only a scatter or irregularly positioned figures. Since such designs lacked focal centres, they have been called 'figure carpets' or 'carpet patterns', this implying their extendibility.[9]

Fig. 3, mosaic pavement in the nave of the 6th C. church at Suwafiya, Jordan. Note the association of an acanthus scroll border with a vine scroll field, and the lack of realism in the sizes of the 'inhabitants'.

This motif (whose sources have been traced back to Hellenistic gold diadems of the fourth and third centuries BC) was extremely popular in Roman mosaic art. As it appears on Byzantine mosaic pavements in the Levant, it is the result of compositional changes which affected the North African inhabited scroll pavements between the first and third centuries.[10] Pavements became increasingly organized whilst the scrolls (transferred from border to field) created formal patterns. If the number of inhabited scroll pavements is taken as an index, it is significant that from a climax in the second and third centuries, the count in North Africa dropped drastically in the course of the fourth century. Conversely, the popularity of the motif which had been extremely limited in the Roman period in the eastern provinces, increased from the late third century and reached a peak in the late fifth and sixth centuries. The period of increasing popularity and compositional changes as the result of North African influence is represented by two pavements from Shahba in the Syrian Hauran, a mosaic from Mariamin in the Hama region and a pavement uncovered in Nablus in the West Bank.

The 'Mosaic of the Four Seasons' discovered at Shahba, ancient Philippopolis, by M. Dunand in 1938 and now exhibited in the Archaeological Museum at Suweida, combines an acanthus scroll border with an emblema which depicts Gê (the Earth), offering the gifts of the Seasons to Dionysos and Ariadne under the supervision of Ploûtos (Wealth).[11] Next to the Roman villa which yielded this mosaic, a set of four rooms of another villa with mosaic floors was excavated in 1970. In three rooms, geometric motifs, interrupted by panels enclosing a series of heads, surrounded emblemata which depicted Orpheus and the beasts, the wedding of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, and Ares, God of War (Hom., Od. 8.266 ff.) and the Charites or Three Graces. In a fourth room, a large band of marine scenes - putti boating, fishing or riding on the back of dolphins - framed an emblema portraying an Oceanus head. In the fifth room, within a vine scroll border, an emblema displayed the love-making of Ariadne and Dionysos (Ov., Her. 10; Metam. 8.174 ff.) watched by Herakles and Maron.[12]

Other pavements have also been uncovered. They include a depiction of the Birth of Aphrodite, and of Artemis surprised by Acteon, King of Thebes, who was punished for having boasted about this exploit by being turned into a stag and eaten by his own dogs (Paus. 9.2.3; Ov., Metam. 3.131 ff.; Nonn., Dion. 5.287 ff.). All these pavements belong to the short floruit of building operations at Philippopolis during the reign of the Emperor Philip the Arab (AD 244-249) who elevated his birthplace to the rank of colonia, and up the end of the third century. The mosaic of Mariamin discovered in December 1960 and now displayed in the Hama Museum, provides another variant on the combination of the emblema with a scroll border in the central part of a house.

The Mariamin pavement has been dated to the third quarter of the third century on the basis of comparison between the hairstyles of the young women playing musical instruments in the central panel and that of Empress Otacilia, wife of Philip the Arab, as depicted in sculpture and on coins.[13] A mosaic forming the northern part of the floor of a long hall accidentally came to light in 1973 in the course of drilling in preparation for the erection of a block of flats in the centre of Nablus. It is now on show in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The pavement combines a panel composed of a geometric border, an acanthus scroll border and a central emblema now lost, with three small rectangular panels depicting mythological scenes. Panel 1 is destroyed. In Panel 2, the boy Achilles is being turned over to the centaur Chiron for his education. Panel 3 depicts Achilles throwing off his female disguise, grasping the weapons brought by Ulysses and Diomedes and following the Greeks to Troy. Achilles had grown up in hiding in the gynaeceum of Lykomedes, King of the Dolopes on the island of Skyros. He had been sent there by his mother Thetis who had heard from the high priest Calchas that Troy would never be taken without the help of Achilles and who knew that her son would die in the Trojan War. In publishing this mosaic, we have dated it on epigraphic, technical and stylistic grounds to the middle or the third quarter of the third century.[14] It represents the southernmost point of extension of the impetus given to the arts of central and southern Syria by Philip the Arab who also bestowed his favours on Neapolis which he raised to the status of colonia in 244.

These four pavements capture in numerous ways the transition between classical antique and early Christian art: the white ground in the vine scroll border of the Dionysos and Ariadne emblema, the variety of animals, the disregard for the relative proportions in animal and bird sizes which ultimately led in Byzantine art to the depiction of birds as large as zebras or elephants, finally the filling of empty spaces with birds, bunches of grapes, vine tendrils and vine leaves tending towards the horror vacui characteristic of fifth and sixth century pavements.

The overall grid pattern already inherent in borders was extended to the field, so that inhabited scroll fields of the fourth-sixth centuries are reducible to grids of squares, each filled by a scroll. The linear rhythm resulting from parallel, horizontal and vertical rows of scrolls geometrically reduced to circles, whether open or closed, combined with the profusion of scrolls to create a 'carpet' dominated by a repetitive pattern, thus a 'carpet design'. The increasing geometrization of the acanthus, of the vine stem, of vine leaves and of bunches of grapes as well as pattern-making in colour reached its climax in the sixth century. Of this, one example is the alternation between two colours for the arched leaves forming the scrolls, as opposed to the impressionistic and subtle use of colour nuances in the earlier Shahba and Nablus pavements. The scrolls thus became essentially geometric constructions in an organic disguise, as in the Church of Zahrani in Southern Lebanon dated to 524 and in Basilica A at Nicopolis in Greece dated to 540.[15] The geometric version of the inhabited scroll - interlinking circles, rectangles, diamonds and other geometric shapes enclosing animals, birds and objects - was used as an alternative to or as a variation of its vegetal counterpart.

Thus the geometric basis discarded in the earliest carpet patterns made a gradual return. By 450 at Antioch, mosaicists saw the need to structure the floral and the scatter varieties of the carpet pattern mosaic. The 'Striding Lion' pavement belongs to the scattered figure variety but is equipped with the strong focal figure of the lion and with a definite border.

This tendency culminated during the sixth century in a central focalization and a vertical axis, as in the inhabited scroll fields of the Chapel of the Priest John, the Church of SS Lot and Procopius, and the Church of St George of 535-6 at Khirbet al-Mekhayyat near Madaba in Jordan. Symmetry, focalization and verticality are evident in the mosaic of the Church of Elias, Mary and Soreg at Jarash, also in Jordan, where the manifest centrality of the palm results from horizontal and vertical constructional lines. A similar group of mosaics, including those of the Armenian Mosaic in Jerusalem, the Shellal Church of 561-2, the Gaza synagogue of 508-9 and the Maon-Nirim synagogue erected after 536, is provided not with a focal motif, but with an axial row filled mainly with objects such as baskets or vases flanked by antithetical pairs of symmetrically placed beasts.[16] Thus a static vertical central axis resolved a series of dynamic horizontal accents in contrary motion.

This tendency among makers of carpet pattern mosaics to organize, articulate, keep within bounds and to harmonize relationships and proportions, found its fullest expression in works produced during the 'Justinianic Renaissance'. In an undoubtedly unconscious reassertion of the Roman emblema, a number of mosaicists in the North of the Holy Land between 536 and 610 executed large pavements in which a central geometric motif incorporating 'trompe l'oeil' effects of receding planes and surfaces provided a focus for a highly organized matrix of motifs. Examples survive in the Church of Nahariya and in the ecclesiastical farm of Shelomi (Fig. 4 ).[17] Due to their active focal function and the use of perspective, such central motifs deserve the name of pseudo-emblemata, and represent a return to certain compositional principles of the Roman period.

The flowering of the arts under the reign of Emperor Justinian (527-65) and his immediate successors was characterized by the rediscovery not only of ancient rules of lay-out but also of classical techniques and themes. These were adopted and modified.

Tesserae of limestone, marble and glass

The raw material of early Byzantine mosaic floors in the Levant was almost exclusively the many coloured limestone found in abundance in Syria and Palestine. Tesserae of marble (for white), glazed ware (for yellow and red ochre) and glass - smalto - (mainly for blue and green) were used sparingly. In the Glass Court at Jarash were found lumps of glass of different colours - light blue, dark blue, light green, grey and dark red - altogether weighing over 120 lb. These were presumably part of the stock in trade of a glass factory at the time of an eighth-century earthquake; the colours are similar to those of the cubes used in sixth century pavements.[18]

The mosaic known as the Hammam Baisan pavement (Fig. 5) which floored a funerary chapel in Bet She'an (ancient Scythopolis) around AD 530 and is now exhibited in the garden of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, displayed an unusual prominence of glass tesserae: frit-coloured green with iron for light green, green glass with iron for dark green, glass coloured with iron for olive green, and glass coloured with copper for dark blue.[19] It is the modest Levantine answer to the magnificent wall mosaics of Ravenna, in particular those glistening with gold, marble and glass and depicting the Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodora and their suites in the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna dated to 546-8.

Fig. 5, Hammam Baisan pavement, Israel, c. AD 530.

Tesserae density

In second and third century pavements, for instance at Antioch, the size of tesserae was small and the number of tesserae to the dm² extremely high. Thus at Shahba, the tesserae measured 0.5 x 0.5 cm, there being 380 tesserae to the dm². At Mariamin, the tesserae measured 0.4 x 0.3 cm and there were 440 tesserae to the dm². After the fourth century, the count dropped. In the Byzantine period, three qualities of pavements can be distinguished: coarse pavements with 20 to 60 tesserae to the dm²; a middle quality with 60 to 110 tesserae to the dm²; and, fine work with over 110 tesserae to the dm². The majority of fifth and sixth century mosaic pavements in the Levant belonged to the middle quality or Group 2. A fourth, so-called 'mixed' group consisted of pavements in which smaller tesserae were used for certain areas such as faces, arms, hands and legs. In the field of the Hammam Baisan pavement, the tesserae count is 108, but for bodies and faces it is 167. In Room L of the Monastery of Lady Mary at Bet She'an dated to 553-4 or 568-9, the tesserae count is 103 in the field but 361 in the faces.[20] In the Church of the Holy Apostles of 578-9 at Madaba, the count is 60 in the field but 400 in the faces.

This is reminiscent of the differences in the sizes of tesserae and their density between firstly the emblema and mythological panels in the Nablus mosaic - with minute tesserae 0.3 x 0.4 cm totalling 373 tesserae to the dm², secondly the inhabited acanthus scroll border laid with tesserae 0.7 x 0.8 cm totalling 200 to the dm², and finally the crude outer border of large tesserae 1.6 x 1.6 cm, there being 46 tesserae to the dm². The use of smaller tesserae for specific areas of a pavement ultimately harked back to the opposition between vermiculatum and tesselatum in Hellenistic and Roman mosaics.

Classical themes in some Byzantine mosaics of the Levant

For all that Christianity had been the State religion of the Byzantine Empire since AD 392, Byzantine culture remained fundamentally classical in spirit. The mosaicists of the Justinianic Renaissance drew much of their inspiration from Greek mythology and Roman daily life. The excavation in 1982-5 of a mid-sixth century hall under the atrium and narthex of the Church of the Virgin at Madaba, disclosed three remarkable panels framed by an inhabited acanthus scroll. The upper panel showed Aphrodite and Adonis, the three Graces (each named as Charis), four Erotes and a peasant-woman (Agroikis). The lower panel which is damaged, depicted the Euripidian myth of Hippolytus and Phaedra. The Tychai or Fortunes of three cities (Rome, Gregoria which is unknown, and Madaba) wearing turreted crowns and sitting in state above and outside the panels, were superficially christianized by the addition of a cross at the upper end of their sceptres.[21]

Two Erotes hold a crown above the head of Achilles flanked by Patroclus and a young woman named 'Eubre' on a sixth century pavement accidentally uncovered in Madaba in 1960. The maiden's nudity under a transparent dress has been made quite clear, and the mosaicist has unashamedly emphasized the muscles, testicles and pubic hair of the male heroes. Likewise, he has delineated the breasts of a dancing girl (Banke) wrapped in veils and the sexual organs of a satyr next to her. These figures were all that remained of a bacchic procession (thiasos) in a panel associated but separate from the Achilles panel.[22]

The healthy lack of inhibition displayed by that particular Madaba mosaicist was exceptional at a period which was dominated by prudery. Human beings (and even animals) were consistently shown sexless, positioned in such a way as not to reveal their genitals or - in the case of men - endowed with a loin-cloth. Moreover, the hunting and vintaging putti of Roman mosaics were turned into real people - hunters, horsemen, farmers and vintagers leading their donkeys to the wine press, carrying baskets of grapes or treading the grapes - all dressed in the style of the sixth century. The human repertory, the bestiary and aviary of mosaic pavements thus passed from the realm of mythological fantasy to that of rural reality, with elephants, zebras, giraffes and even a bushbuck led on a rope by an African, alluding to trade contacts between Palestine, Arabia, India and Egypt.[23]

Dionysiac processions at Erez and Sheikh Zuweid on the borders of Southern coastal Palestine and Egypt,[24] witness further to the forceful resurgence of classical iconographic themes. Paganism in fact never died out completely in the Mediterranean basin. That the cult of Dionysos-Bacchus, the god of wine, still flourished in the Byzantine Mediterranean world is proven by the Dionysiaca of Nonnos of Panopolis in Egypt. This long epic poem composed in the middle of the fifth century, described the travels of Dionysos across Asia Minor and the Near East on his way to India. In fact, the Dionysiaca describe Dionysiac traditions which were still very much alive in Byzantine times.

In third-century AD Paphos on Cyprus, Dionysos held his attribute - grapes - tantalizingly, but serenely. At Sepphoris in Galilee, he seemed already a little tipsy reclining in his conch-shaped chariot whilst a herald signalled on his pipes the approach of the procession. On another third-century mosaic pavement at Sepphoris, Bacchus is disgustingly drunk to the point of actually being shown throwing up. Three centuries later, Sepphoris mosaicists applied their creative urges again to various Dionysiac themes, such as the centaur.[25] Other classical motifs in sixth-century Palestine included the venatio - the struggle between gladiators and wild beasts in the amphitheatre - and the spinario - a child pulling a thorn from his foot, who heralded yet another Renaissance - the Italian Quattrocento.[26]

Thus the strictly limited nature of inventiveness in artistic forms is bound to produce such returns to earlier and often forgotten standards. Fashion in the ancient art of mosaic as in painting, sculpture and even dress is less a matter of sequential progression than a series of cycles within which the artist returns, sometimes deliberately but frequently unawares, to certain points of departure.