THE LARGEST MOSAIC OF THE ENTIRE ROMAN CIVILIZATION

When the Romans entered in contact with the Greeks after the Punic wars, they became attracted also by the mosaic art. The first mosaics of antiquity were created at the time of Alexander the Great and were made out of river stones. They had an irregular but polished appearance and normally represented hunting scenes.Once Rome conquered Greece, in the slave market of Delos, where thousands of slaves were traded every day, many slaves found their way towards Rome and were employed by the Romans as mosaicists.Rome and Ostia with their huge thermal baths complexes displayed once very sophisticated mosaic scenes in the floors of their public buildings.However, an example of private use of mosaic is the Mosaic of Alexander, found in the House of the Faun in Pompei in the 1800s during the excavations of the city buried under the ashes of the Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The mosaic depicts a battle between the armies of Alexander the Great and Darius III of Persia and measures 5.82 x 3.13m (19 ft x 10 ft 3in): a total of around 1,5 million tesserae form the composition of what is still considered the larged mosaic coming from the ancient world.The work may be considered the copy of lost panel painting depicting the battle Of Issos and attributed to the painter Philoxenos of Eretria.
The portrait of Alexander is one of his most famous. Alexander's breastplate depicts Medusa, the famous Gorgon. He is portrayed swooping into battle at the left, on his famous horse, Bucephalos, and focusing his gaze on the Persian leader.Darius is shown frightened, riding on a chariot and stretching his hand as a gesture of asking help or because he may have thrown a javelin.What makes the mosaic an almost three dimensional work is the cast of the shadow on the main subjects of the mosaics and on the horses as well. Shadows are rendered with sophistication and account for the advanced knowledge of space that the artists who made this work had.Furthermore, the idea of space is enhanced by the foreshortened representation of the battling warriors.Alexander's eyes are made bigger to express his ferocity and to convey fear on his enemies. Worth noticing the dramatic intensity of the battle that shows horses and riders falling at the clashing of the armors. It really seems to be part of the battle when looking at this masterpiece and it's worth a visit at the Arcaheological Museum of Naples where it is permanently exhibited or at the House of the Faun in Pompei where since 2005 a copy made by the National laboratory of Italian Mosaics of Ravenna has been set up on the floor to show how that room looked like two thousand years ago.