MAG’s MOSAIC WITH THE HEAD OF TETHYS
by Libby Clay
Docents traveling to Maryland in November will have an opportunity to see some of the mosaics and artifacts from Tethys’ old neighborhood. The Balti Museum of Art is the last venue for the exhibition “Antioch: The Lost Ancient City.” Complete with a full-scale model of a Roman triclinium, or dining room, the exhibition helps us to imagine MAG’s 3rd century AD Tethys (42.2) in her original setting. Antioch was a wealthy jewel in the crown of Hellenistic Rome, and the living was not only easy, it was sumptuous and hedonistic. Daphne, a residential suburb and Tethys’ home town, was the Newport of Antioch, where the rich retreated to escape the heat of the city.
Antioch-on-the-Orontes ranked with Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople as one of the four great cities of the Roman and early Christian world. It was favored by economic and strategic advantages, fertile soil and a temperate climate. Today it is called Antakya and is located in the Hatay province of southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border. The catalog of the exhibit describes it as “A modest Turkish town,” its former glory vanished. Natural disasters, Bubonic plague and Persian and Arab conquests beset Antioch and it went from riches to rags.
An archeological search for ancient Antioch was launched in the 1930s. Participating members of the Committee for the Excavation of Antioch represented the Louvre, the Balti Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum, Princeton University and, later, Harvard University and its affiliate, Dumbarton Oaks. The committee expected to excavate ancient buildings, but these eluded them because the city was buried in many layers of silt. Instead, a great harvest of mosaics from private houses was found, thus revealing about Antioch’s elite than about its public and religious life.
From Porticus, Vol. V, we learn that while many of the Antioch mosaics, some 300 of them, were found through systemic exploration, MAG’s Tethys panel was a chance find. Plowing and winter rains had eroded ancient terraces, and the building from which she came was discovered, though not fully excavated. The publication contains a photograph of Tethys in situ.
Mosaics were a status symbol in the Roman Empire. They showed that the owner had wealth and taste. Complex figural scenes (often mythological events) were reserved for rooms in which ancient viewers would be stationary. Dining couches would have been placed over the geometric area of the mosaics. Figural scenes in corridors were simple. They were meant to facilitate, not arrest, movement. Often corridors contained geometric designs. Figural mosaics marked doorways and linked two architectural spaces, as was Tethys’ function. Mosaics were often re-worked, to bring something considered old-fashioned up to date. Floors were often raised to facilitate heating the room with hot air from an adjacent furnace.
Mosaics did not originate with the Romans, although they reached their apogee under them. Mosaics of crushed shells decorated ziggurat columns as early as 3100 BCE. In the fifth century BCE the Greeks used pebbles, gathered from beaches, to create designs. Later, in Hellenistic times, the pebbles were carefully trimmed and juxtaposed, leaving no cement showing. Mosaics in their true form were invented in Carthage.
Workshops developed a method for cutting stone tesserae. Artisans cut thin slabs with wire and abrasives, then shaped the tesserae with hammer and chisel for the spaces they were to fill. They used local materials whenever possible: white limestone, gray shale and red tile being very common. The burning of stones helped increase the variety of colors. Marble was picked up from marble-masons’ yards. Most mosaics were worked on the spot; but figural mosaics were often created in workshops rather than on site. They were bedded in a foundation of marble or terra cotta and the finished assemblage (the Emblema) was then laid into a geometrically decorated floor mosaic of much coarser consistency.
According to Vitruvius, the first stage for laying a mosaic was to prepare the foundation. He advocated several carefully graded levels of pebbles and crushed brick bonded with mortar, to the thickness of two feet. Most mosaicists were content with shallower bases. The main outlines of the design were either scored onto the surface of the foundation mortar or painted on it. Then the cubes were laid on a thin bed of fresh mortar and pressed down so the mortar rose up to fill all the spaces. After the cubes had been laid in the mortar, the finished mosaic would have been grouted to fill any remaining cracks, sanded to a flat surface, and polished, ready for the owner to admire.
The unevenness of shape and size of the tesserae in MAG’s panel reveal they were all made by hand. Notice how carefully they have been shaped to give form and dimension to Tethys' face, especially on the left, shaded side. The stones of the eyebrows are very small, as are those forming the gold lines of her wings. Squinting brings out the shapes formed by the tesserae of her face. Kneel and view the mosaic at eye level and note the gradation of tesserae. See if you can tell if Tethys was made in a workshop or on site.
FYI: Antony and Cleopatra were married in Antioch in 37-36 BCE, and Antioch was the base for St. Paul’s missionary journeys ca. 47 CE.
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