Lod mosaic restoration funded by Leon Levy Foundation and private collector

Mosaics are one of the most beautiful and enduring legacies of the Roman Empire so I am always thrilled when one is uncovered, or, in this case, slated for restoration and exhibition.

[Image - A worker for Israel's Antiquities Authority washes a 600- square foot Roman mosaic, circa 300 A.D., after it was unveiled in Lod, central Israel. AP Photo by Sebastian Scheiner.]

Israeli archaeologists unveiled one of the largest and best preserved mosaics ever found in the country Wednesday, for only the second time since it was discovered more than a decade ago.

The 600-square-foot (56 square meter), 1,700-year-old Roman floor mosaic was found in 1996 during an archaeological dig in the town of Lod near Tel Aviv.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority covered the mosaic back up, though, because it lacked funding to properly protect it, said Miriam Avisar, the archaeologist who first unearthed the mosaic.

That changed with a recent $2.5 million joint gift from the Leon Levy Foundation and antiquities collector Shelby White to fund construction of a new center to house the mosaic in Lod. The center is set to open in 2012, said Jacque Neguer, head of art conservation at the Antiquities Authority.

Antiquities Authority workers slowly rolled a thick covering off the massive mosaic Wednesday and began a laborious cleaning process using water and soft sponges. After the cleaning is completed, they'll transport the entire mosaic to Jerusalem for a lengthy preservation process.

The mosaic is made up of more than two million small stones and covered with detailed pictures and geometric shapes.

"The decorative elements are extremely rich and well executed," Neguer said. "We have hunting scenes, lions and giraffes from Africa, and scenes of the sea with ships and fish."

The mosaic is similar to others found in Tunisia and elsewhere in North Africa, Neguer said, indicating the owner or artist may not have been from Israel. - More: Associated Press

I have photographed several hundred Roman mosaics in my travels. Although I am still in the post-production process on a number of images from my most recent trip to Rome in March 2009, you may view others that I have uploaded to Flickr here.

A couple of years ago I attended a fascinating exhibit of North African mosaics at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. The following books were recommended for further study and I found them quite interesting:

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A God From Dresden

I found the following article very interesting. Having photographed hundreds of statues in some of the world's finest museums, including the Getty Villa, I often marvel at the subtle clues scholars use to identify art that is often unearthed in fragments with no inscriptions to provide a hint of identify. Often it is the hairstyle, fashion or degree of sensuousness and comparisons to existing identified statues from the time period (if period can be ascertained) that often determine the description presented to the public.

In this case, a headless statue from a Dresden museum collection, is being studied by modern conservators at the Getty to see if some agreement can be reached as to how to present this work of art. I found it amusing that conservators across the centuries have identified it as Alexander the Great (adding suitable accessories), Antinous and, ultimately, Bacchus at different points in time. At a Getty colloquium in August, attendees generally expressed their leanings toward Bacchus, but the Getty has decided to make the conservation of the statue (to be exhibited headless), rather than a predetermined identity, the focus for its upcoming premiere at the Getty in December.

"On a recent sunny Saturday, while most Southern Californians were deployed somewhere enjoying a weekend hiatus, 20 art historians, conservators and museum officials shifted in their chairs around a long, U-shaped table in an air-conditioned conference room at the Getty Villa in Malibu, theorizing, listening and pondering out loud whose head to put on a headless 1,800-year-old Roman statue.

The result of their scholarly exchanges and deliberations would determine whether the future identity of the monumental white marble semi-nude, 2nd century male being reassembled in the Getty's workshop would be the Roman god Bacchus or the real-life boy lover of the Emperor Hadrian, known as Antinuous, or the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great.

Imagine such a group in future millenniums trying to decide whether a headless torso dating from 20th century America was originally a likeness of Elvis Presley, Truman Capote or Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Such challenges have faced collectors and curators of classical antiquity since Roman statuary began being unearthed by archaeologists in the 17th century, often missing heads and limbs and conclusive identities. The decisions made by museums through the years regarding how best to present and display these precious remains of the Greek and Roman past have reflected changing attitudes toward conservation and its purposes, aligned with improved methods and techniques.

The Saturday workshop convened by the Getty's Antiquities Conservation Department offered a case study in the current state of the rarefied craft. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that conservation became a profession and the custom of restoring damaged statues by whatever means was supplanted by the desire to display them closer to the state in which they were found.

"How comfortable are we, after all these restorations, to show a statue without a head?" Jens Daehner, the German-born assistant curator of antiquities at the Getty, asked during his own formal remarks that reviewed the statue's various incarnations since its first known display in Rome in 1704, when it carried an ancient female head (not original to it), probably a likeness of Athena but restored with a helmet so as to match an image of Alexander the Great seen on Greek coins. Though this sounds contrived by today's standards of archaeology, during the Baroque era a preference for complete sculptures allowed and encouraged such improvisation.

After the statue was removed from Italy in 1733 by a Saxon prince and brought to Dresden, it was modified again to include a fig leaf and a spear, still identified as Alexander. Then in 1804, according to a contemporary catalog of the museum's collection, it became Bacchus (Dionysus to the Greeks), a result of prevailing notions about its body type and drapery style, but retained the previous head and helmet associated with Alexander -- while losing the earlier restored right arm along with the fig leaf and spear.

Changing parts

WHAT Podany referred to as "the unrecognized power of the restorer" was demonstrated when, during the tenure of the sculptor Emil Cauer the Elder as a restorer in the Dresden antiquities collection, the statue became "Antinuous in the guise of Bacchus," with a new head made of plaster and a new plaster right arm attached.

Then, in 1894, a new director of the museum replaced Cauer's Antinuous head with a plaster cast of another Antinuous on display in the British Museum. The right arm was again removed, and this was the state of the statue when it was placed in storage during the Dresden museum's closure due to World War II. It was not damaged during the bombing of Dresden but in June 1945 was shipped to Moscow along with the rest of the collection, regarded as the spoils of war.

By the time it was returned to Dresden by train in 1958, the statue had suffered extensive damage in transit and had broken into 158 pieces. It remained out of sight, stored in four wooden crates until those crates were air-freighted to the Getty in November.

In his remarks, Daehner mentioned the "high, wide chest" to be a signifier of Antinuous, yet the absence of long hair on the shoulders pointed again to the god of wine. "I am convinced we are dealing with a statue of Dionysus," the curator said. He also noted that a piece of paper plugged into a plastered hole turned out to be a page from a book published in 1894, but this detail did not aid the investigation.

After Marc Walton, a scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, showed a microscopic slide of the statue's Carrara marble exterior that looked like the surface of the moon and revealed "multiple plasters, referring to different campaigns of restoration," the group adjourned to the studio to see the statue itself, headless but otherwise impressive. It rose somewhat larger than life (6 feet, 8 inches) from a wood pallet, its white torso supported temporarily by a heavy chain hoist. Seeing the statue reassembled for the first time in their lifetimes, the scholars and conservators circled it and examined the details of its drapery; the pitch, or attitude, of its interface with the platform; the fissures and lines revealing where the fragments had been attached." - More

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Pompeii Cyberwalk Seeks to Reduce Visitor Damage to Pompeii

Apparently a collaboration of the University of Rome with cybernetic companies like the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ) and the Munich Technical University has produced a virtual Pompeii Cyberwalk using an omnidirectional treadmill:

The Institute of Conservation reports:

"Growing numbers of tourists and visitors can pose serious problems for many fragile historic sites. The conservation of valuable documents in archives has for some time increasingly depended on the creation of digital surrogate copies, but the challenges surrounding the creation of a digital surrogate of an entire ancient city have proved too daunting until now. This week, it will be possible for the first time to - literally - take a stroll around virtual Pompeii.

A stroll around Pompeii is not just virtual reality – it involves real walking. Instead of sitting at a computer looking at a virtual streetscape, the ‘visitor’ walks - or even runs - on a multidirectional treadmill. As they move naturally, a 3-D headset changes the visitor’s view of the Pompeii streets so they can literally walk around a city which has not existed for 2000 years.

The walk around Pompeii is possible thanks to an EU-funded collaboration between the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ), the University of Rome (La Sapienza), the Munich Technical University

Visitor numbers to heritage sites around the world continue to soar. It is expected that by 2020 there will be 1.6 billion international travellers per year, compared with 663 million in 1999. Over 16.5m Chinese tourists ventured abroad in 2002, twice as many as in 1998. The number of visitor to the Louvre rose from 5.6 million in 2001 to 8.35 million in 2006. In 2005 Angkor Wat received 1m visitors, Pompeii 2m, the Alhambra 2.2m and even Macchu Picchu has climbed well past 0.5m per year, growing at about 6% annually. If the world’s architectural heritage is not to be trampled flat by eager visitors, new ways have to be found of managing visitor numbers, and it is possible that a new generation of virtual reality experiences will have a part to play in this. It is not yet clear though whether high-tech encounters such as the Pompeii Cyberwalk will satisfy people’s desire for contact with the past – or whether they will just make the problem worse by stimulating their curiosity for ‘the real thing’ even further. "

There's a fascinating movie about the project at:

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