design history 2008 at kingscliff TAFE: Europe: Roman Mosaics

The history of Roman mosaics goes back some 4,000 years and the floors of Roman buildings, cathedrals, and museums were often richly decorated with intricate and mathematically based creative mosaics. These captured and emphasised scenes of history and everyday life. Some mosaics were standard designs, others were more personalised designs.

The Romans commenced their mosaics by creating a line scale drawing to help act as a structure and model to help create the mosaic. They then used different coloured stones, glass, brick or ceramics to create patterns. Cone shaped terracotta was also used by pushing it in point first into a background, to give decoration. This terracotta also added differences in the texture.

Later, this technique bought mosaics into an art, with precise geometric patterns and detailed scenes of people, gods and animals, symbols and geometric designs. A lot of the Roman mazes that were created in mosaics used rotational symmetry by repeating a set geometric design.

Roman mosaics by 200 BC, took on new characteristics and were influenced by Eastern styles using special glass tesserae manufactured in northern Italy. These gave extra detail and range of colour to the work. These pieces were only a few millimeters in size, and this allowed mosaics to replicate the detail in paintings. Mosaics often used pieces of glass to create vivid colours and reflect the light.

Over thousands of years, the Roman mosaic styles have changed and the artists have developed and fine tuned their techniques whilst still being heavily influenced by Eastern culture. Even today, Roman mosaics are still being created and the artists still try to replicate the mosaic styles, techniques and traditions from the past.