How the Alexander Mosaic was Seen in Ancient Rome in the House of the Faun, Pompeii

From discovery.com 2014

Wear patterns on one of the most celebrated mosaics of antiquity have allowed researchers to reconstruct exactly how ancient Romans viewed the artwork.

Found during the 1831 excavations in the lava-buried town of Pompeii, the Alexander mosaic (now on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples) is the most famous example of an early tessellated mosaic.

Measuring 19 feet by 10 feet, the piece was made around 100 B.C. out of roughly 4 million tesserae (small mosaic tiles).

The artwork once decorated the floor of a room in the House of the Faun, one of Pompeii's grandest residences.

The tiny tesserae, applied following the "opus vermiculatum" technique (basically set in worm-like rows), depicted a dramatic scene from a battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian king Darius III.

"Although there is some disagreement as to exactly which battle the mosaic depicts [either the Battle of Issus in 333 B.C. or the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C.], we know many things about this mosaic. For example, it is uniformly agreed [that the mosaic is] a copy of a famous Hellenistic painting executed sometime around 300 B.C.," Martin Beckmann, of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, told Discovery News.

"What is less know is the mosaic's role as a floor surface in an Italian house. In this role, it has the potential to provide evidence of the tastes, interests and desires of the wealthy Romans during the late Republic," Beckmann said.

In his study, presented today in Anaheim, Calif., at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, Beckman looked at some large, entirely destroyed areas of the mosaic.

These areas were filled in ancient times with mortar and have been in the same condition since they were originally discovered.

Beckmann identified four mains pattern of wear: a large, crescent-shaped area around the portrait of Alexander, two patches in the upper portion of the mosaic and two other patches in the lower portion.

"The patches basically show us the mosaic through the Romans eyes, and tell us what interested the ancient viewer. Although Darius is the most prominent figure in the mosaic, the Romans were much more interested in Alexander," he said.

"They were also apparently fascinated by the plight of two Persians crushed beneath Darius' chariot, especially one who is shown with his face turned from the viewer but reflected in a shield -- a skillful artistic trick," he added.

"There is clear evidence of multiple ancient repairs in these damaged areas. The most recent restorations filled the gaps with mortar, while more ancient repairs used tesserae," Beckmann said.

According to Beckmann, the repairs tell a story. They indicate that the mosaic had been damaged by overuse, and often in exactly the same areas.

"Over time, even careful footsteps would have loosened the very small stone tesserae from their tenuous hold in the mortar of the mosaic's bedding. At least once, substantial repairs were attempted, but clearly by the first century A.D., these had been given up in favor of simple patching with plain mortar," Beckmann said.

The two upper patches of wear even allowed Beckmann to reconstruct a theoretical "tour" of the mosaic. Here is Beckmann's explanation:

 

Once the visitors had entered the room -- we might imagine a group of dinner-guests led by their host -- the tour would begin with Darius and his Persians.

The host would have stood above Darius' horses, ( fig 1) explained why the great king was fleeing, and pointed out the artistic novelties in the lower portion of the mosaic.

The guests would have milled about at the foot of the mosaic, taking in the overall scene, and then briefly concentrated themselves around the figures of the two doomed Persians. (fig a &b)

Then the host moved to the left and stationed himself in the area above the figure pair composed of Alexander and the unfortunate Persian he is spearing. (fig 2)

The guests marched right onto the mosaic and crowded around the image of the Macedonian king, standing right on top of his body, being careful however not to step on his head or that of his horse. (fig's c)

 The guests arranged themselves in a semicircle, so as to leave a line of sight open between them and their host, who was also able to see Alexander's head from his vantage point above.

Here the guests stayed the longest and here is where the ancient tour would end.

Today, the original Alexander Mosaic is on display in the National Museum of Archaeology in Naples. An exact copy – identical in shape, size, colour and materials used – was created after several years of work by the Scuola Bottega del Mosaico di Ravenna and is now installed in Pompeii.

In 2003 the International Center for the Study and Teaching of Mosaic (CISIM) in Ravenna, Italy, proposed to create a copy of the mosaic. When they had received approval, the mosaic master Severo Bignami and his eight-person team took a large photograph of the mosaic, made a tracing of the image with a dark marker and created a negative impression of the mosaic.

The team composed the mosaic in sections in 44 clay frames, trying to preserve the pieces of the mosaic in the exact positions they are in the original mosaic. They had to keep the plates wet all the time. Then they pressed a tissue on the clay to create an image of the outlines of the mosaic in the clay.

The team recreated the mosaic with about 2 million pieces of various marble types. When they had placed all the pieces, they covered the result with a layer of glue and gauze and pulled it out of the clay. They placed each section on synthetic concrete and then united the sections with the compound of glasswool and plastic.

The project took 22 months and a cost equivalent to US$216,000. The copy was installed in the House of the Faun in 2005.

Pompeii Walls Crumble Under Rain and Red Tape - Mar 3, 2014

by Rossella Lorenzi

An emergency meeting has been called for tomorrow by Italy’s culture minister after a series of collapses this weekend have raised concerns about the fate of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

Preserved under volcanic ash from a devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., and rediscovered in the 18th century, Pompeii is now crumbling — threatened by red tape and heavy rain.

An arch supporting the Temple of Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty, crumbled during a rainstorm on Saturday, followed by the collapse on Sunday of the wall of a tomb around 5.5 feet high and 11.5 feet long in the necropolis of Porta Nocera and another wall about 8 feet high and 13 feet long in Via di Nola, the major road.

All the affected areas have been closed to the public.

“Right when Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘The Great Beauty’ won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, walls tumbled down in Pompeii,” culture minister Dario Franceschini said.

“It’s a warning. We must believe in the beauty of our country and preserve it with pride,” he added.

Franceschini, who was appointed last month in the new government of prime minister Matteo Renzi, called for an emergency meeting on Tuesday to assess the damage, verify routine maintenance as well as the progress of the EU-backed Great Pompeii Project to restore the archaeological site.

Visited by more than two million visitors per year, Pompeii has been decimated by continuous collapses.

“For every crumbling that is reported, there are another nine that do not make news,” Antonio Irlando, president of the Cultural Heritage Observatory, told reporters.

In 2010 the collapse of the House of Gladiators caused an international outcry, raising doubt about Italy’s ability to properly protect its archaeological heritage.

The accident prompted a EU-backed 105 million-euro project to save the ancient city.

Although some conservation work started last year, only about 10 million has been used.

An innumerable series of complaints filed by companies whose bids for contracts have been turned down, have slowed the entire project.

But time is running short: the money needs to be spent by 2015, or funding will be withdrawn.

“At the moment, a plan to ensure strong drainage for rainwater is desperately needed. Without it, Pompeii is destined to collapse entirely,” Giovanni Puglisi, the head of Italy’s national UNESCO commission, warned on Monday.

The Latest Threat to Pompeii’s Treasures: Italy’s Red Tape - April 20, 2013

Pompeii Falling From Grace: Pompeii’s ruins are a Unesco World Heritage site, but despite money from the European Union, the Italian government is struggling to maintain them.
By RACHEL DONADIO and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Published: New York Times: April 20, 2013

POMPEII, Italy — Destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, Pompeii survived excavation starting in the 18th century and has stoically borne the wear and tear of millions of modern-day tourists.

But now, its deep-hued frescoes, brick walls and elegant tile mosaics appear to be at risk from an even greater threat: the bureaucracy of the Italian state.
In recent years, collapses at the site have alarmed conservationists, who warn that this ancient Roman city is dangerously exposed to the elements — and is poorly served by the red tape, the lack of strategic planning and the limited personnel of the site’s troubled management.
The site’s decline has captured the attention of the European Union, which began a $137 million effort in February that aims to balance preservation with accessibility to tourists. Called the Great Pompeii Project, the effort also seeks to foster a culture-driven economy in an area dominated by the Neapolitan Mafia.
In a telling juxtaposition, however, a day before the project was initiated in February, the police arrested the head of a construction company hired to modify an ancient theater at Pompeii on charges of inflating costs and violating the terms of an earlier preservation project. And last week, a team of law-enforcement officers and labor inspectors conducted a surprise inspection to make sure that the local Mafia had not strong-armed its way into the restoration work.
Pompeii’s problems stem from its status as “one of the biggest and most important sites in the world,” and its location “in one of the areas with the highest concentration of organized crime in all of Europe,” said Fabrizio Barca, the minister for territorial cohesion in the caretaker government of Prime Minister Mario Monti.
Nevertheless, Mr. Barca expressed confidence that the program would be successful, and that it would prove that the Italian government could get things done.
“The project is going to reshape the way things are dealt with,” he said. “If we don’t preserve Pompeii, then the state has failed.”
Since the 1990s, a series of special administrations have been put in charge of Pompeii. In 2008, the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi named a special commissioner for the site, giving him powers to subvert routine bureaucracy. But the post was dissolved in 2010. This year, one commissioner was placed under judicial investigation on suspicion of using state money for projects that went beyond maintenance, like renovating an ancient theater for performances.
Watchdogs also question why several new buildings were built at Pompeii at great expense and with unclear scope, and whether a 2010 project, now defunct, to allow visitors to adopt some of the many stray dogs at the site was the best way to use part of the emergency prevention financing.
The investigations have also blocked some tourist-friendly initiatives, including plans to convert a villa on the grounds into a restaurant and another building into a museum.
Pompeii has “always been an emergency” since it was first excavated in 1748, said Grete Stefani, the current archaeological director of the site. The most recent crisis phase began in November 2010, when the so-called Schola Armaturarum , which housed an ancient military order, crumbled into the street after a period of torrential rain.
At a time when the decadent Berlusconi government was in tumult, the collapse hit a nerve, capturing the general air of decline in Italy after decades of deferred political and economic maintenance. Magistrates are investigating the collapse.
In Pompeii, about 10 houses, out of dozens on the site, are always open to the public, with a handful of others on a rotating basis. Conservators are repeatedly forced to shore up crumbling walls and water-damaged frescoes rather than plan the systematic maintenance of the 163-acre site to prevent sudden collapses.
“Pompeii is an appropriate metaphor for this country,” said Sergio Rizzo, a journalist at Corriere della Sera and an author of a book on the mismanagement of Italy’s cultural heritage. “It’s a beautiful place, a marvelous place that every country would like to have,” he added, “but it also reveals the workings of Italian chaos.”
Pompeii’s longstanding problems have stymied a succession of Culture Ministry archaeologists entrusted with its conservation. Stefano De Caro, who oversaw the archaeological work at Pompeii from 1977 to 1984, says the site’s woes stem from Italy’s shortsighted budget policies, which have kept it in a near-constant state of crisis.

“The fact is that Pompeii has been underfunded for 50 years, and gorging on funds every once in a while doesn’t help if you need to eat every day,” said Mr. De Caro, who is now director general of the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, or Iccrom, based in Rome.
There are also rogue employees and wildcat strikes. In recent years, several of the about 150 custodians have been sanctioned for asking tourists for money to show them areas closed to the public, the site’s management said. Under the terms of a 10-year-old outsourcing bid, the private company that runs the ticket office does not allow the use of credit cards, creating headaches for tourists and raising concerns about fraud.
On a recent sunny afternoon, the volcanic peak of Mount Vesuvius rose in the distance. Crowds of school groups traipsed through the site, which draws more than 2.3 million tourists each year, many of them cruise ship passengers on day trips. Ms. Stefani, the site’s archaeological director, summed up the challenges as she showed off a recent, stunning renovation of the House of the Gilded Cupids, whose many frescoed rooms face a central courtyard in the classic Pompeian style. “This is a city without living inhabitants to carry out the day-to-day care that any home requires,” she said.
The new conservation strategy of Pompeii will be focused less on restoring individual monuments than on comprehensive maintenance, including improved water collection and disposal. Conservators say that many recent collapses were the result of bad drainage and the slow erosion of the ancient mortar.
Conservation has been hindered by a hiring freeze, particularly of skilled restorers but also of lower-level maintenance workers. “It’s been a situation with lots of generals but no troops,” said Valerio Papaccio, an architect currently overseeing preservation.
Under the new works project, the Culture Ministry has hired more archaeologists and architects with an eye toward the future.
“The E.U. funding is a good starting point to overcome this situation, but it’s not enough to save the site,” said Teresa Elena Cinquantaquattro, the site’s superintendent since 2010. “The new hires are vital, and by programming restorations year by year we can overcome the emergency.”
She says that critics have ignored the challenges in maintaining a vast, open-air site, and that many hard-working staff members toil in silence and anonymity to keep the site functioning. “I don’t deny that there are problems, but there’s also been a lot of hard work done here,” she said. “Pompeii is so vast that it requires enormous efforts.”
Officials say the Great Pompeii Project has a better chance of succeeding where other plans have failed because it is a comprehensive strategy involving three ministries: Culture, Interior and Territorial Cohesion. Economic development officials examine the investment potential of bids, while Interior Ministry officials make sure they are awarded to companies without ties to organized crime.
There are also timid advancements to introduce private sponsorship at the site, much in the same way that the Packard Humanities Institute has made the nearby Herculaneum, also buried by Vesuvius, a model site for archaeological preservation.
But some veteran observers doubt whether Italy will ever be able to finish the job. “The city has been excavated to an extent that it cannot be properly preserved, so we should just rebury parts of it,” said Mr. De Caro of Iccrom. “This way isn’t working, and to maintain things the way they are means certain death.”

Restoration starts at crumbling ancient city of Pompeii - February 6, 2013

By Tom Kington

Los Angeles Times - February 6, 2013

ROME -- Conservation work at the crumbling ancient Roman city of Pompeii began Wednesday, a day after police announced a corruption probe into previous restoration work at the site.

The new preservation campaign, funded in part by $142 million from the European Union, follows a series of structural collapses at the popular tourist site near Naples -- including at the House of Gladiators, a building used for training the arena warriors, which collapsed into a heap of rubble in 2010.

The collapses have been blamed on years of mismanagement and underfunding.

Buried by falling ash when nearby Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, buildings, streets and even curled-up corpses were found preserved when Pompeii was rediscovered in 1748. Today, the site draws 2.3 million visitors a year.

But its deteriorating condition prompted the Italian government to declare a state of emergency in 2008, and experts have reported that custodians collect pieces of crumbling wall and hide them before tourists arrive each morning.

"About 55 years ago, it was possible to visit 50 areas at Pompeii, but only five today. We need a change," said Johannes Hahn, a regional policy commissioner for the EU who launched the new project at Pompeii on Wednesday alongside Italian ministers.

Work is beginning on two buildings, known as the Criptoportico and the Casa dei Dioscuri.

The fresh funding will be used to help protect the site from heavy rains that have contributed to the collapses, and to restore frescoes and increase security, officials said.

Hahn said checks would be in place to ensure that no money is siphoned off by powerful local Mafia clans. Contracting would be carried out with "full transparency," he said.

On Tuesday, police placed Marcello Fiori, a former site director, under investigation for possible abuse of office. Fiori, who was given special powers to save Pompeii in 2009 by then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is accused of improperly diverting restoration funds to the rebuilding of the city's ancient amphitheater using modern stone and concrete so that it could host open-air operas.

Also, a former contractor, Annamaria Caccavo, was placed under house arrest on suspicion of inflating costs by 400%.

Pompeii's decline is part of a problem shared by numerous archaeological and historical sites across Italy, due to slashed budgets and lack of personnel and safekeeping. On Wednesday, a small portion of a 16th century ceiling fresco at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence caved in when a workman put his foot through a floor above the room.

The fitful restoration and maintenance work at Pompeii contrasts with a different approach at Herculaneum, a Roman city also buried when Vesuvius erupted and where archaeological digs have been supported by the Packard Humanities Institute of Los Altos, Calif.

Restorers at Herculaneum have focused on continuous and less spectacular maintenance, including improving drainage to stop water infiltration, which has helped preserve the site.

Pompeii wall collapses, despite new conservation initiative - 22 Apr 2012

Josephine McKenna – Rome - The Telegraph - 22 Apr 2012

A 2,000-year old wall surrounding an ancient villa at Pompeii has collapsed – just two weeks after the Italian government launched a 105 million euro project (£86 million) to save the precious archaeological site.

The Special Archaeological Superintendent for Naples and Pompeii confirmed the collapse of the red-frescoed wall next to an unidentified villa in an area already closed to the public.

The collapse of the wall is particularly embarrassing for the government as it follows several other incidents at the world heritage site in the past two years.

There is growing concern Italy's ability to protect it from further degradation and the impact of the local Mafia or Camorra.

Giulia Rodano, cultural affairs spokesman for the centre-left Italy of Values party, said there was a need to restore state funding that had been eroded by government cutbacks.

"How many walls have to fall, how much rain or snow should we expect to see a turnaround in state finance for the protection of cultural assets," Ms Rodano said.

"Without a continuous state programme for the conservation and restoration of our archaeological sites, extraordinary and sporadic intervention with European or private funds risks being ineffective."

The latest initiative launched in early April is funded by Italy and the European Union.

At the launch Mario Monti, the Italian prime minister, said the project was designed to secure the buildings currently at risk in one of the most important cultural site in the world.

"We want to ensure that this is accomplished through honest and capable workers and companies while keeping away the organised crime that is still strong in this area," he added.

Pompeii was destroyed when a volcanic eruption from nearby Mount Vesuvius buried the city in ash in 79AD and it now attracts more than 2.5 million visitors a year. The site has fallen victim to various collapses in the last few years, prompting criticism from both Unesco and the European Union