NB: The Great Palace Mosaic Museum has been closed since 2016 for restoration and refurbishment. Make sure you check that it has reopened before planning a trip.
Great Palace Mosaic Museum: the facts
For once, I will stick to the facts. Confronted with mosaics of such beauty and intricacy, covering so great an area and made so long ago, I don’t know where to begin. So I wont try. Look at the photos, break open your piggy bank, cajole your bank manager, have another look behind the back of the sofa, and book your flight now. The Great Palace Mosaic Museum of Istanbul is simply not to be missed.
An imperial palace
The palace was thought to have been built in the time of the Emperor Justinian I during the glory days of the Byzantine era which means it is close to 1,500 years old. In the ensuring years, one empire fell and another took its place. Parts of the palace were destroyed by successive building works but the mosaics, damaged and fragmented as they are, give us a glimpse of imperial power and artistic expression at its height.
Eighty million tesserae
The mosaics are composed of up to 80 million glass, terracotta and lime cubes – as many as 40,000 per square metre. They cover 250 metres, one eighth, so we are told, of their original extent. One eighth. Golly.
The boys, my stalwart mosaic spotting team, asked how long it would take to make. In response, I showed them a little section of the mosaic no bigger than this three-leaved sprig. I said that would take me an hour, not including the background tesserae. So, hmmmm, that means the whole thing would have taken…….
Mosaic designs
The mosaics at the Great Palace Mosaic Museum once decorated a series of colonnaded halls and consist of friezes in four strips. Each scene, each motif, is different and unique. This was not a formulaic work using ancient designs borrowed from previous generations.
This is a mosaic of breath-taking ingenuity and originality. The figures fizz with energy and life and the scenes are remarkably diverse and devoid of pretension. The colours and intricacy of the works are undiminished by the passing of the centuries.
Take the faces, for instance:
Not to mention the over-sized facial close ups:
the emperor Justinian
The man who commissioned the mosaic is the same emperor Justinian who decorated the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. His image remains there, opposite that of his wife, Theodora, and her retinue.
He was clearly a man who liked a bit of flash. This was the Justinian who spoke Latin as his first language and was determined to reinstate the power and prestige of the Roman empire. A pretty grand plan if ever there was one. He probably learnt to walk on Roman mosaic floors and yet he didn’t seek to copy the great mosaic masters of the past. That is not to say that the mosaics at the Great Palace Mosaic Museum do not include familiar themes, Not least the hunting scenes:
unusual scenes
But where else do you see an elephant strangling a lion?
A monkey and it’s feathered companion gathering dates from a palm tree:
Or a bear family gorging on the ripe fruit of an apple tree:
The mosaics include mythological creatures which are common themes in ancient designs:
domestic life
But alongside them, right among them, are scenes of domestic life. Ordinary people getting on with their lives and taking pleasure in daily activities. A woman nurses a child as a dog looks on:
A donkey is offered some refreshment:
Children herd the geese:
These mosaics are so devoid of the pomp that one would expect of imperial palace life that I wonder (only my own little theory) if these colonnades provided a meeting place for ordinary citizens to come and bring their petitions to the palace officials.There is something so refreshingly down to earth about the designs. Here is a man falling:
As his donkey guffaws:
A contemplative, or shepherd, sitting alone on a rock and gazing at, at what? We’ll never know.
A huntsman lifting his hound in that impulsive hug of delight one gives a beloved pet:
What makes the mind boggle, or mind my mind at least, is that this is only an eighth of the original. If we have such unremarkable acts as a woman bearing water could there have been depictions of washing being hung to dry, a family sitting down to eat, a soldier being greeted by his parents after long years away?
Oh dear. I promised you I would keep quiet and simply let the photographs shower into your electronic lap, but I cannot help myself. Let me stop, take a deep breath and stand back for you to enjoy them while I turn once more to savour the details:
And my favourite to finish:
