Discovering Roman Mosaics (2020)

There is a story about an inventor who approached Trajan[0] with plans for new construction machinery that would require far fewer laborers. Trajan's response was incredulous: if he used the new construction equipment, how did he expect he would manage to pay everyone? I.e. the construction project was itself a beneficium to those it employed.

[0] Could be another emperor -- I just have an association of this story with Trajan's markets for some reason.

Those were people making those mosaics, not machines.

We like to turn things into code (and "configuration languages", and package managers, and licenses, and...), why should mosaicists, if they're already spending all day picking and setting little bits of stone, not want to create images?

Lagniappe: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-test/ncsa/whats-new.html

Iirc creating detailed compositions on mosaic was considered an incredible skill, and artwork like it would show off your wealth and connections.

Love that first image - the ground movement has made it look like a piece of fabric.

Busy, but still harmonious. If I "step back" (eg the last image in the article), I don't get a sense of visual clutter, I get a sense of a coherent, balanced design. This, although from a later period, is a good example of what I'm getting at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_mosaics#/media/File:...

Maybe it's something to do with the use of symmetry (I'm hoping a trained artist swings by and explains my own comment to me).

The little I know about contemporary mosaic[0] is about as busy. Perhaps even more, as we now have wider color palettes. Compared to contemporary architecture, yes, I'd agree though. But it's on par with contemporary fine-arts.

[0]: https://www.instagram.com/ferraribacci/

Worth keeping in mind the mosaics themselves are pretty large, and also indoor features typically illuminated by grease lamps or braziers, so you'd never see the whole thing all at once in bright electric lighting like we do today.

Ironically, our sort of monochrome minimalist white marble aesthetic owes itself to a misreading of Greeks and Roman design. The more we dig up, the more we find how colorful classical antiquity was.

But it's possible that, in the Roman era, with fewer forms of visual entertainment, these elaborate scenes served not just as decoration but as storytelling devices