An ancient mosaic and me
I’m meant to be working. But I’m not, I’m stroking.
I’m running my hands over this ancient mosaic. Feeling its grooves and cavities. Trying, through my fingers, to read its story. It’s 1700 years old and has come from Antioch (now Eastern Turkey) to Edinburgh via New York and London. The full facts of how it came to Scotland to be repaired are unknown and are probably unknowable.
The mosaic comes to Edinburgh
A few weeks ago I received a phone call from its owner. The mosaic, a round design measuring 120cm in diameter, hung on his bathroom wall. It fell off and was damaged. Would I be willing to repair it?
Yes.
So now it’s here in front of me along with two plastic pots. One contains whole tesserae that came out when the mosaic hit the floor. The other is full of flakes, fragments and bits of mortar. Some salvageable. Some not.
History of Antioch
If I keep touching, it will yield something. Antioch was the third largest city in the Roman world. Ranked in significance under Alexandria and Rome, it was a place of major commercial, military and cultural importance. With a population of more than 200,000 and ideally situated to control the eastern reaches of the empire, it attracted those with wealth and power.
Inevitably, they built themselves lavish villas and wanted the very best that the fashion of the time dictated – mosaic floors. (Detail, left, from another Antioch mosaic – the Judgement of Paris, 2nd century AD, Louvre Museum). Hundreds of them were excavated from the site in the early 20th century and dispersed to museums around the world or later housed at the Hatay Archaeological Museum in Antakya.
The ancient mosaic
According to a certificate of authenticity issued by Antiquariam, an ancient arts gallery in New York City, the mosaic in front of me dates from the late 3rd century to the early 4th.
It is a simple design of two birds drinking from an urn at its centre. They are set within a circle which has four equally spaced petals branching out from it. In turn, the circle is placed within a four pronged star. In the semi circles formed between the star and the rim of the piece, are four squares each containing a three-dimensional cube.
It isn’t a mosaic which is unusual in its design or the way it is made. There are hundreds of thousands like it. But it is its ordinariness, its every-day utilitarian-ness which makes it a pleasure to stroke.
Who owned the mosaic?
I imagine that the mosaic was the centre piece of a reception or garden room. Its owner was perhaps a middle ranking official. Not rich enough to employ the finest craftsmen of the period, but aspirational and monied. Perhaps he did well and moved elsewhere. Antioch was a cosmopolitan city where people came and went.
The surface of the mosaic is pitted and worn and there is a dark patch on one side where it looks like fires were lit. I imagine that over time the villa became dilapidated and occupied by a poorer family or perhaps several. Animals might have been kept in the garden room and meals cooked in the corner where the smoke could escape. Heavy metal pots dumped on the already-old floor or children lying in the sun chipping lazily at its surface might have caused some of the damage.
Be that at is may, a series of strong earthquakes destroyed the city in the 520s, causing the walls to collapse and burying the mosaic for the next 1500 years. Despite the devastation, the quake saved the mosaic, protecting it from the elements and causal looting.
Excavating the mosaic
For that reason, the mosaic was almost certainly still there when a formal excavation took place in the 1930s carried out by a consortium of American museums with the Turkish authorities. The mosaic might have been removed then, but I would guess even later. It would probably have had a border, either a wave or guilloche pattern or a basic frame of rows of tesserae in different colours. I suspect the rest of the mosaic was too badly damaged to be worth saving.
The standard way to lift mosaics from site is to apply layers of muslin to the surface with rabbit skin glue, an extremely strong but water soluble substance. Tools are then used to chisel underneath it, allowing it to be lifted from its original substrate.
The old mortar is picked and brushed away and then the mosaic is set into a new mortar bed before the muslin is soaked and peeled off.
Restoring the mosaic
My first job is to remove the mortar where the tesserae fell out. It requires care and gentle persistence to smooth it away to create a flat surface. I spend a day patiently rubbing and picking away at it with a mosaicists’ most trusted arsenal – a set of dentists’ tools.
Having sorted out the loose tesserae into colour groups, I then took a rubbing of the damaged area and laid out the tesserae onto sticky paper so that I had a reasonably accurate copy of how the rows would lie.
The next thing to do was to replicate the colour of the interstices – the patina of dirt and dust which collected over the centuries. Using a mixture of white tile adhesive and different concentrations of pigments, I made samples until I was happy with the shade. However, in some places the force of the fall when the mosaic hit the floor caused this dust/dirt in the cracks to come out. This left the white mortar exposed. I needed to blend the visible white hair cracks back into the ancient patina. Single tesserae which had fallen out elsewhere were also put back and the mosaic is now ready to return to its owner. Or rather, present owner.
