Object 6: The Alexander Mosaic
AC 20 objects:
Transcript
Round up the dimensions. It's about 9 by 17ft. And the first thing I want to emphasize is that while we're looking at this front, where it's on, this is actually a floor mosaic.
So you should actually be looking at it this way down in front of you.
You shouldn't be looking at it in front of you. And in terms of what it depicts, then it's generally thought to depict the armies of Alexander the Great on the left for the armies of Darius iii, who was the king of Persia.
And we'll discuss that in further detail. But the mosaic was unearthed, or we should say rediscovered in the house of the faun in Pompeii, actually.
So it's from Pompeii. And due to archaeological kind of stylistic elements that we found at the site, we actually think that we know who the last owners of the house of the farm was.
So we believe the house belonged to the Satry family.
S A T R I I. And we'll return to the family shortly in a short while.
And in terms of dating, it's generally believed to be dated between somewhere between 120 and 100 BC.
And again, this is on the basis of kind of archaeological evidence of the mosaic and of the site itself.
But what's interesting is that this is actually thought to be a copy of a late 4th century, kind of early 3rd century BCE painting itself.
So what we're actually looking at is a replica of an earlier painting.
So just as like many of us today, we go into kind of art galleries or museum gift shops to find posters or pictures of art pictures that we like, this in itself is a replica replication of an earlier painting.
But by calling it a replication, I really don't want to kind of undermine the skill that went into constructing this mosaic, because it required a tremendous amount of skill and actually time as well.
And it's estimated that over 1.5 million tiny pieces of marble called tesseride were used to construct the image.
And I've given you a close up here. I hope it looks a bit better at the back there of the head of Alexander the Great's horse and Persephone.
And you can see that the tiny marbles are arranged in these gradual curves.
So it's very clear to see, like the neck of the cephalus and then this curvy feature of the mosaic.
And the curvy nature of the mosaic is due to a technique which we call called opus vermiculatum.
And this opus vermiculatum technique is just more commonly called wormwort.
And you can see why. It's due to the curvy nature of mosaics. And it almost gives the appearance of little worms on the mosaic.
But the result of this kind of worm technique, the opus vermiculatum, is that what you get in the mosaic at the end is an astonishing 3D effect.
It almost looks like it's painted and it's not actually a mosaic.
And if I can go back, another thing that you might have noticed in the mosaic is that the scene is composed entirely of reds, yellows, blacks and whites.
So even the brown of Bucephalus head is actually, I would say, more of a shade of red.
And this is because the mosaic makers were entirely dependent on marble that they could find in nature.
So this in itself shows that even constructing or cracking off these tiny tiles was a hugely time consuming endeavor.
It took, I don't know, a lifetime to collect all these tiny little pieces of marble from nature.
So it's a highly skilled endeavor. And as I mentioned, the mosaic is actually found, as I said, in the house of the Faun in Pompeii.
And it's called a house the Faun because of this little fella here in the picture that was found in the courtyard.
But funnily enough, he's actually a satyr, but the name has the fawn stuck and it's just kind of remained.
So it's actually an incorrect name for him, but the name stuck in the houses.
And as you all know, this house, along with the rest of Pompeii, was covered in ash due to the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
So the house essentially lay undisturbed until it was initially excavated in 1831 by the German Archaeological Institute.
So we've actually been digging up Pompeii. And while a lot more Pompeii has actually been unearthed since 1831, the Alexander mosaic is still the most exceptional mosaic that has been found in Pompeii.
But as I said, who knows, they could find another one, because there's actually still quite a lot of Pompeii that's to be unearthed still.
But in today's terms, the Alexandrian mosaic is the most incredible mosaic that was founded Pompeii state.
And so it's not surprising that we found this incredible mosaic in the house the faun of all the houses.
And that's because the house, the Faun, which as I said belongs to the Satry family, is one of the most luxurious houses that has been uncovered in Pompeii.
It actually occupies a whole City block. It's huge, so it's nearly 3,000 square meters. The Alexander mosaic isn't the only mosaic in the house, and I would encourage you your own time, actually, just to look up the house itself and you'll get to see the other mosaics in the house and within the house itself.
Then the Alexander mosaic decorated the floor of an exedra almost in its entirety.
And an exedra was a kind of reception or kind of a veranda, which would have been used for conversing and entertaining.
So even without going into the finer details of the mosaic, we already know from its placement that this mosaic was in a very social part of the house.
This was a massive display of wealth by the family, and it wasn't just for private viewing by the family itself.
They wanted this mosaic to be seen. So where is the mosaic now? Because while the mosaic was originally rediscovered in 1831, it's actually no longer in Pompeii because it was transported to Naples in 1844.
So it actually took the archaeological team 13 years to decide what they wanted to do.
And it was years of debate. They had to form a commission in the end and they voted for its removal.
And In November of 1844, the mosaic was put in a box and it started a very slow journey from Pompeii to Naples as it was pulled by a cart with 16 oxen, I believe.
So it took it quite a while to get to Naples, and at one point, the box actually fell off the back of the cart and they were too afraid to open it because they thought they had damaged it.
So they waited a whole year before they opened it because they were just terrified.
Well, thankfully, more damage hadn't been done to mosaics, so after its long journey, it actually ended up in the Archaeological Museum, the national wood in Naples.
And this is what it looks like on display in Naples.
However, recently it appears that it was actually been removed for restoration.
So if you were to go to Naples Museum in the morning, what you would see is a facsimile banner, and that's essentially a giant kind of cloth representation, a replication of the mosaic as it appears.
As I said, it's been removed for restoration reasons.
And if you remember, I said this mosaic was meant to be seen on the floor, not in front of you, but it ended up in Naples.
And one of the reasons for this is that because it's so large and made of all these tiny tiles, it's actually massively heavy.
It's about seven tonnes. So I'd say because Naples had it displayed on the wall for so long, what you get is massive compression of the tiles actually happening.
So they were seeing cracks were starting to form as well as bulges in the mosaic and the tiles, individual tiles.
So I'm not sure what they were doing to counteract that, but it will be interesting to see whether they kind of reinforce the wall or the structure to enable to hold the weight.
But the good news is actually, if you were to go to Pompeii, there you can actually see a modern replica in the house.
And this is due to the efforts of an eight person team led by the mosaic master Chevro Begnary from the International center for the Study and Teaching of Mosaic from Ravenna in Italy.
And if you're interested in mosaic and general, I highly recommend going to Ravenna.
It's not a place a lot of people seem to know about, but mosaics are absolutely beautiful.
And it took the team about 22 months to do this replication.
And it cost about 216,000American dollars to do the replication.
So it was reinstalled back in the house in 2005. And as I said, it's well worth going to see the mosaic as it's going to see Pompeii in general.
I was there only last year and I saw the replica and to be honest, at first I didn't even realize it was a replica.
It's exceptional. You would not know they're looking at a replica. It's astounding, actually, what they. And it's also nice to see it as an original conquest.
You get kind of more of a feel for the. So that's just some kind of very basic details on the mosaic itself.
And before we kind of look at the mosaic in more detail, I just want to give you some background information on the two central figures of the scene, those depicted in the mosaic.
So, as I said, the mosaic depicts a battle between Alexander the Great on the right and Darius the on the left.
And if you're not familiar with Alexander the Great, he was the king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon, and he succeeded his father Philip II to the throne in 336 BC.
So he was only 20 when he became king. And as you can see from his dates, he actually died fairly young.
So he was only 32 when he died. But. But he left behind a huge legacy which had long lasting effects on the empire that he had formed.
And this is because he spent most of his ruling years conducting lengthy military campaigns throughout western Asia and Egypt.
And so by the age of 30, only 30. He had actually created one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India.
And during his military campaigns, Alexander actually set his sights on the Persian Empire, which as I said at the time, was being led by Darius III.
So in 334 BC, Alexander began his invasion of the Persian Empire and he fought Darius in a series of battles for control.
And so while the mosaic is originally believed to show Alexander's defeat of Darius at the Battle of ISIS in 333 BC, Alexander continued to defeat the Persians in several battles after this battle.
And he eventually ends up looting and destroying the Persian capital, Persepolis.
330 BC. And with Persepolis destroyed, that essentially means that Alexander is now ruler of the Persian Empire.
So Darius flees then at that point. But before Alexander was able to reach Darius, Darius was actually killed by one of his own relatives.
But as I mentioned, Alexander's own victory actually very short lived because In June of 323 BC, Alexander died in Babylon at the age instead of 32.
And it's still debated whether he died of natural causes or whether he was poisoned.
A lot of scholars think that there was a lot of unrest in his army and that one of his generals may have poisoned him.
They become very dissatisfied with his campaigns towards the end of his life.
And Alexander's death had huge implications for this sprawling empire that he had created in a short time.
And if we want to present a very simplified version of what happened after Alexander's death, we can say that first of all, his death death essentially leads to the dissolution of his Greek Macedonian empire which he had built.
And this is because after his death, a series of civil wars breaks out amongst his generals because they were kind of vying for control and they all wanted the empire.
So in a sense you kind of see that the generals who are collectively known as the Diodothi, they essentially break up the empire.
So Ptolemy I taking Egypt, Cassander in Greece and Macedon Antigonus I, Seleucus.
So where you have one person in control, Alexander of his empire, it's now been divided amongst his generals.
And as I said, one of these generals was called Ptolemy I.
And he essentially gained control of Egypt. And after his death, his family actually continued to ruin Egypt right up until the death of famous Cleopatra in 30 BC.
So she's actually his direct descendant. And secondly, Alexander's death actually marks the beginning of what we call the Hellenistic period.
And in Mediterranean history, the Hellenistic period is the period which comes after classical Greece, so comes after the Classical period.
So it takes place between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC and the conquest of Egypt also takes place by the newly emerging Roman Empire the same year.
So essentially the Hellenistic period comes to an end when the Ptolemy family's ruling Egypt comes to an end at that point.
Now the Roman Empire is now in control. And the third effect of Alexander's death is the continued diffusion of Greek culture.
Because essentially the conquest of Alexander and even after his death by his generals led to the creation of new Greek cultural communities which went far beyond Athens and even far beyond Greece.
And Ptolemy, Egypt is a good example of this kind of spread of Greek culture, because in the case of Ptolemies, which is the collective name for Ptolemy's perspective, they were essentially Macedonian Greeks now in charge of the land of Egypt, which had its own pride in culture and history, which was very different to their own Greek culture.
So to legitimize not only their rule, but their actual presence in Egypt, the Ptolemies enforced Greek culture and actually Greek education on the Egyptians or in Egypt.
And what's interesting for this is that it's one of the first times that you get access of non Greeks to Greek education.
And so the Hellenistic period actually produces new forms of literature and artworks which reflect the new multicultural communities of Tlayman, Egypt and the other Hellenistic kingdoms.
So the local communities start to actively engage with Greek culture and Greek materials.
And an example of this I can give you, see Alexandria there at the top of Egypt, is that in Alexandria, in the Hellenistic period, you actually, as I said, have Jews who now have access to Greek education.
So the first major translation of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament takes place in the Hellenistic period in Alexandria.
So the first major translation of the Hebrew Bible was not into Latin, which a lot of people say that it was actually into Greek.
And this is because the Greeks, the Jewish translators, had access to a very basic Greek education.
And it's also more likely of the Jews of Alexandria would not have spoken Hebrew, but actually spoke Greek.
So they needed a Bible that they could read as Greek speakers.
So that's a lot of information there, what happens after the death of Alexander.
But the takeaway message is that Alexander's death saw the beginning of the Hellenistic period and the dissolution of the Greek empire, his Greek empire amongst his generals.
And this in turn led to the continued spread and diffusion of Greek culture far beyond Greece.
And we'll return to that just shortly. But let's turn back now to the Mosaic itself, as I said, and kind of look at it a bit more detail.
And what you kind of see straight away is that this is a very chaotic scene.
It's very bleak. You have a very, like, grey sky in the back. There's one tree in the background, no leaves on it.
There's a real sense of death and destruction. You have all these kind of scarlet bows and shields and sword sheets on the foreground here.
And if you kind of look at it, you can kind of see that Alexander's army is on the left, which, unfortunately has had the most damage.
And you can see that the right side is really the Persian side.
So, unfortunately, very few figures of Alexander's army actually survived.
But thankfully, Alexander himself actually survives.
And here's a close up of Alexander himself. And as you can see, he's kind of shown in a profile view without a helmet, as I said, riding his horse, Bucephalus.
And his face is unshaven. His hair is quite long. His eyes are big and wide and open. He kind of gives this very youthful appearance as he's riding horseback into battle.
His face, even though it's almost in strict profile, is that you actually get to see that his torso is turned towards the viewer.
So you can see his body is facing outwards and his head is kind of to the side from that way.
But you can make out that he has this very elaborate and a very decorated Curacaan seat or his armor.
So it's unified cuirass. And you can see that there's an organ actually in the kind of breastplate section of the cuirass.
And we can actually make out. I'm not sure if you can see in the back there, but he's actually holding a spear down here at the bottom.
And if we follow the spear. The spear, sorry. We can see that he's actually plunging it into the belly of Persian in front of him.
So, as I said, it's a very violent, It's a very graphic scene.
And this kind of feared Persian is very much in the center of the scene.
So the violence is really emphasized on that figure.
And even you can see that his fears go in his stomach.
His horse seems to have actually taken injury as well.
And you can actually see blood running out the horses at the bottom.
So again, it's very graphic, it's very violent. And the violence is further emphasized, as I said, because this spirit Persian kind of essentially seems to be the center of the mosaic.
And we also have another Persian here next to him.
And if you can see he's actually really horrified boy sees in front of him and he's actually trying to turn his horse away from the front.
He's trying to almost retreat. And no one even seems to have noticed that there's a poor Persian here who's about to be trampled.
And it even looks like he might be trampled by his own king's chariot.
So the Persian side is really sustaining a lot of heavy fire, if you want to put it that way.
And then behind this figure who's trying to turn his horse, we have Darius up on his chariot, which is being pulled by a charioteer.
And we'll just look at that in more detail. So we have Darius then up on his chariot, it's being pulled by a chariot here.
It's a very typical Persian chariot. So it's a two wheeled chariot being pulled by four horses.
And if you can notice something, you, you can see that the chariot here is actually the only person in the scene that's looking the wrong way.
So everyone else is looking towards the bottom this way and the charioteer is looking the other way.
And what he's doing is he's actually trying to turn the horses away from Alexander.
So what you get then is that in a sense that you're actually seeing the moment of retreat by Darius.
Because unlike the chariot here, you can see the soldiers on the right hand side, all facing towards Alexander at the coming battle.
But what's really interesting is you can see that they have their hands up in the air and they have this kind of shocked and bewildered expression, because if you were charged into battle, you're not going to have your hands up in the air like that.
So it really emphasizes there is absolute panic among the Persian side.
And as I said, no one's even noticed that the four crater over there, the right side, is about to be trampled by his own king's horses.
But my own personal favorite part of Mosaic is actually this Persian solo down here in the front.
And we'll look at him in a bit more detail. So as you can see in this close up, we're not actually looking at the Persian's face front on.
What we're actually seeing is his face is being reflected in a shield in front of him.
And I think that actually just makes the whole thing more evocative that you don't actually see the horror on his face directly, you're actually seeing the reflection.
And what's further interesting is that the shield appears to be not even his own shield, it actually appears to belong to this person here.
You can just make out the bare legs. So what you have is someone kind of lying on the ground with their shield and then the Persian is looking at it frontwards like this into his reflection.
And the bare legs is actually a really noteworthy part of the piece of mosaic because we know that the bare legs is actually a Greek soldier.
It's not a Persian. It's a Persian that you wear very decorative kind of feminine trousers, as is typical for Greek representations of the scene.
So what we have is actually a Greek soldier on the Persian side.
And this is striking because on the one hand you could just say that a Greek soldier rushed forward to kind of face the Persians himself.
But we can't dismiss the fact that this could be a Greek mercenary fighting for the Persians.
And this is well attested to in the ancient literature that Greek mercenaries fought for the enemies, that they fought for the Persians.
So in a sense that if we see that this is a Greek mercenary, he's almost getting his by being trampled.
So it's a very subtle detail, but it really actually.
And it's even clearer, as I said, that the bare legs are those of a Greek because both armies are actually dressed in attire that's appropriate to their customers, their homelands.
So you can see the Persians are typically characterized by their typical kind of riding dress and they wear high decorated trousers, unlike the Greece, they wear sleeves, tones or kind of cloaks as well.
Some of them feature breastplates. If you look up closely, you can actually see some of them are wearing jewelry.
Some of them have earrings on as well. And some of them actually have these kind of very soft shoes that they appear to be, you can influence here.
And these are kind of typical Persian representations.
Persians were often presented in a highly feminized manner by the Greeks to kind of dehumanize them.
And you can see Darius as well is wearing his own kind of brown kitten and he's got this white thick stripe going down the middle.
And this is actually a symbol that he is a king, his kingship and even he actually we is a very stiff upright tiara that is actually typical of Persian canes as well.
So that's a very simple description of the image and kind of what you see in it.
Does anyone want to add anything to anything that interests you here?
That's very much like kind of a basic surface level kind of viewing of would do.
But before I want to we've examined that. So now I want to kind of go into deeper understanding or interpretation of the mosaic.
And as you know, interpretation always Depends on the viewer.
It depends on who the viewer is and what their background is.
And as I mentioned earlier, they had a miss period, as the period in which this movie was produced saw a great diffusion of Greek culture across the Mediterranean.
But if we have a look here at the countries, all the kind of lighter areas, essentially Alexander's empire, what his generals take over after his death.
And if you look at this, you can see that Italy up in the top here is not part of this kingdom.
Alexander never got as far as Italy, he never conquered Italy, he never got to Pompeii.
So Pompeii was not a cultural Greek center. So what is this image of a Greek king doing in Pompeii?
Why would Greek art appeal to the people of Pompeii?
And to understand this, or try to understand this, we need to return to the owners of the house, of the farm, who, as I mentioned, were the Statue family.
Because while we said that the mosaic is clearly a display of wealth, it's important to note that the house was built kind of circa 180 to 170 BC, and the mosaic that was not installed, as I said, until about circa 120, 100 BC.
And this is important because Pompeii did not become a Roman colony until the first century bc.
So if the Statue family weren't Romans, what were they?
And it appears that the Statue family were actually Samnites, who were an Italian people and having the mountainous centre of southern Italy.
So they were not Romans. Well, initially they were not Romans. And this affects our understanding and interpretation of mosaic because it's actually very difficult for us to interpret mosaic within the sunlight context.
But this doesn't mean that we can't attempt to interpret the mosaic, because Pompeii really is a city reflective of Roman life.
Because even before Pompeii became a Roman colony, by the 2nd century BC, Pompeii had already come under Roman influence.
And even when Pompeii became a Roman colony, the local Samnite aristocracy, who would have included the Statue family, they were not obliterated, they were not banished.
What we know that actually happened is that they were actually taken off into the new social and political structures of this Roman colony.
But this still doesn't answer, though, why is a Greek image in a kind of Roman Sam like context?
Why is it in a Roman Sam like house? And one of the reasons is that while I just said Rome and Pompeii had not been part of Alexander's Greek empire, these areas still actually felt the impact of Hellenistic Civilization and art.
And so the wealthy people of Pompeii and Rome wanted Greek art because not only did it show that they were wealthy, but the Greek art objects themselves had the power to reinforce social stratification by conferring status to those who owned them.
And to put that very simply, by the statutory family having this mosaic in their house, it was basically like them having a Rolls Royce.
Okay? So it showed on the one hand that they were extremely wealthy, and on the other hand showed that they belonged to like upper echelon of the fight.
By having the state art, it gave them social power.
So to put it simply, as I said, possession of Greek art or copies became a means of status and as a means of displaying wealth, because these foreign works, by virtue actually of their foreignness, they were actually considered to be higher in cultural value than products that were produced locally.
So if Rome and Pompeii had actually been part of the Hellenistic Empire, Hellenistic kingdoms, they probably wouldn't have been so enamored with this kind of Greek art, actually, because why would you want something that everyone else has, essentially?
And Greek art seems to have been accessible to the people of Rome and Pompeii, either through the spoils of war or just simply through trade.
And even though Rome wants to develop its own artistic kind of taste and value, the prestige of foreign works was never really lost at upon the Romans.
And from the first century bce, we can observe the development of a Roman art market involving auctions, price assessments and even accessors as aids to collection building.
So it's exactly what you would see if you were to go into Christie's or Sotheby's today or any auction house.
All this is taking place in the first century B.C.
and we actually have several letters from the Roman orators.
This wrote in the first century bc, and he was a keen architecture to himself.
And in these letters, he's actually writing to his friend in Athens and he says, acquire me as much Greek art as you can for my villa in Rome.
And he says, at no expense spared. He literally wanted a crown of Roman villa full of Greek arch.
He just knew it held such high prestige. And what you get then is actually hold school, start to emerge.
Both in Greece and in Italy, an actual market started to emerge, specializing in copies and imitations of old Greek art.
And it was specifically for a Roman market. Romans simply loved Greek art. But it's important to bear in mind that copyists might not have simply copied their originals, but may have been called upon to kind of place contemporary social and religious readings into the art that they copied.
And what I mean by this is that on the one hand, at the simplest level of interpretation for the mosaic is that a Roman member of Roman culture could appreciate the mosaic simply due to Alexander's continued fame.
He's a historical figure for them. And it was actually the Romans who were the first to call Alexander the Great.
So that final of Alexander the Great actually comes from the Romans because Roman society was a military society.
And they would have appreciated an image such as this of such a powerful warring king and of these armies.
So for them, Alexander could just stand in a very generic way as a symbol of conquest, success, achievements, all the things that the Romans wanted to imitate and emulate.
So was the Alexander mosaic understood simply as a work of art, as it display of wealth, or did it hold a message for the Roman war machine as Alexander's achievements became for the Romans a model to be emulated and imitated?
And we have evidence of people like Scipio Africanus, the charismatic Roman leader of the late third century BC had been associated with Alexander.
They were making direct comparisons. Julius Caesar was actually also compared to Alexander.
Alexander, both in his own lifetime and the later works of Plutarch and the writer Suetonius actually makes a direct comparison between Julius Caesar and Alexander, suggesting that Caesar actually styled himself on Alexander.
And later, after the battle of Actium in 31 BC, Augustus, during his conclusion, Mark Antony in Egypt, he actually had the sarcophagus and body of Alexander the Great brought out from its crypt that he could lay a wreath of flowers and a crown on it.
And some of the sources actually recount that he broke off his nose wax.
And you can see this simply wasn't him venerating Alexander.
Like, in one sense you could say, yes, Augustus brought up the bodies, could say, this is a great leader, I'm offering respects.
He was also showing the Egyptians that their original kind of Greek person, Greek ruler had now been passed, that the Roman Empire was the thing you were now to look to, or the emerging Roman Empire.
They were the ones in control. And even when he became shortly after this, not emperor yet, when Augustus became emperor, he actually initially used a seal Alexander's image on, and then he eventually substituted his own image.
So it's very clever propaganda. He's kind of saying, like Alexander, I'll use this to start myself off and I'm going to present myself.
So the Romans here, he had great admiration for Alexander as a military freeware.
But while Alexander seems to have been a symbol in the Roman line for any Great ruler.
Roman admiration for Alexander was really, as I said, only one side of the coin and reality.
Rome's relationship with Alexander was a complex issue with a competitive edge, because generally the Romans of the republican period did not have much admiration for the Greeks warfare.
And they regard their contemporary Greeks in a particularly competitive spirit and considering themselves to be superior in the practices of war.
So while the Romans did respect Alexander as a builder of empire, they were highly competitive and eager to prove their superiority over Alexander, even long after Alexander had been dead.
At this stage and in the 20s BC Livy and his Histories of Rome, he really offers the most famous discussion of the issue and makes the competition between Rome and Alexander very transparent.
And so he suggests that had Alexander actually turned to the west instead of going east, so if Alexander had actually come and tried to invade Rome and Italy, that the Romans would easily have done away with him, that they said he wouldn't have been any hassle to the Romans whatsoever.
And in reality, Alexander could probably walk all over the place at that point.
He turned east instead. But that just shows competitive ed in 20 B.C. that he says, not a chance he would have. So for the Romans, they were superior to the Greek and to Alexander.
And the emerging Roman Empire really surpassed the military deeds of Alexander that they were trying to emphasize.
They were like the new case on the block, in a sense.
So what we've seen, there's actually a number of potential interpretations for the mosaic kind of has its own problem.
First of all, we cannot know for certain whether the early samlite owners of the house identify with Roman readings and interpretations.
We just simply can't know, to be honest. Secondly, was this just a simple display of wealth by the Saxby family or viewed as a message, as a Roman war machine, as an image of military success and might, which the competitive Romans then got to kind of supersede and surpass?
So, as you can see, there is multiple readings and it can be presumptuous actually to insist upon one reading, to be honest.
But each of the readings really highlight how the meaning of a work of art might proliferate according to the particular interests of the viewer.
I think. Good question in the back there. Yeah, the kind of general reasons just for everyone to hear that.
So why would Alexander turn east as he did? And why didn't he go west in a sense? And he really went east because the Persian Empire was really at its height at that point.
There was a lot of splendor, spectacularness about it.
He really wanted just to kind of go, leave the place, get all their bounty and their stuff.
And if you think back earlier, the Persians had invaded Greece multiple times to the point where Greece is maybe completely under the control of Persia.
So they kind of wanted revenge as well also. Yeah, that's a good question, though. But if he had turned west, he probably would have taken over Italy with no problem, I would say, actually.
And so, as I said, they're just a. Of general readings of the mosaic. Just be careful not to push one reading because we can never be certain what the actual reading of the mosaic is.
We can only kind of infer a meaning as viewers ourselves.
And lastly, as I understand, you always have to write an essay for the objects that you discuss.
So in terms of your kind of final essay, then I kind of say you're more than welcome to discuss the mosaic along these issues of interpretation.
You can discuss it in a relation to cultural appropriate and displays of wealth and any other ideas that you might think of.
Simple, basic examples. Does anyone have any other questions? No, that's it. So thanks a million.
Notes
Dimensions of the Alexander Mosaic
Approximately 9 by 17 feet.
Displayed on the floor rather than viewed straight on.
Historical Context
Depicts the armies of Alexander the Great (right) and Darius III of Persia (left).
Rediscovered in the house of the Faun in Pompeii.
Likely owned by the Satry family, with dating between 120-100 BC.
Believed to be a copy of a late 4th - early 3rd century BCE painting.
Construction and Techniques
Created with over 1.5 million pieces of marble known as tesseride.
Utilize the opus vermiculatum technique, also called wormwort, to achieve a 3D effect.
The mosaic predominantly uses red, yellow, black, and white marbles.
Discovery and Excavation
The mosaic was uncovered in 1831 by the German Archaeological Institute after being buried in ash due to Vesuvius' eruption in 79 AD.
It was transported to Naples in 1844 after a lengthy debate among archaeologists, taking a year for its transport due to concerns of damage.
Current Status
Displayed in the Archaeological Museum in Naples but currently under restoration, visible as a facsimile in the museum.
A modern replica exists at the house in Pompeii, created by an eight-person team in 2005 at the cost of $216,000 and took 22 months to complete.
Figures Depicted
Alexander: depicted as youthful, riding Bucephalus, unshaven, with a spear plunging into a Persian.
Darius III depicted in a chariot, depicting panic and retreat.
Persian soldiers portrayed with expressions of horror and confusion amidst chaos.
Interpretations of the Mosaic
Reflects both a display of wealth by the Satry family and Roman admiration of Greek culture.
Indicates the social status conferred by possession of Greek art in Roman society.
Various interpretations of the mosaic's purpose, whether as a display of wealth or as a commentary on military success.
The relationship between Rome and Alexander was complicated, characterized by admiration and competition.
Conclusion
Interpretations of the mosaic can vary according to viewer context.
The analysis of the Alexander mosaic can inform essays regarding cultural appropriation and artistic representation in Roman society