THE NILE MOSAIC IN PALESTRINA

Famed in archaeological literature as an inimitable example of the Hellenistic mosaic tradition, the Nile mosaic in Palestrina is one of the largest and best known from antiquity,and a milestone in the Nile genre, which, until the late imperial age appeared widely in the paintings, mosaics and ceramic tiling that adorned the homes of the rich in Rome, Latium, Campania, and the western and North African provinces. The date of the Palestrina mosaic is the subject of fierce debate. Most experts think it was created around 80 B.C., though some date it back to the second century, relating it to the work of Demetrios the Topographer, a landscape artist who set up shop in Rome in 165 B.C.However, Palestrina’s Nile mosaic should be related not so much to the creativity of a single individual as to a fashion or a particular climate that influenced the people who commissioned artworks. It follows the Alexandrian school, whose subjects of choice were romantic landscapes studded with rocks, twisted trees and small temples, and populated by small human and animal figures. Indeed, it constitutes a programmatic manifesto of Alexandrine culture, and of the idea the Romans had of Egypt. As such, it combines a taste for the exotic and local colour with a taste for science. The mosaic is at once a map and a natural-history chart. At the top are the mountains of Ethiopia, in the centre the city of Thebes and its temple to Amon, and at the bottom the Nile delta and Memphis, with its temple to Isis.

The idea one gets from this overview is not of the traditional Egypt, but of a Hellenized country, with temples built in Greek style and troops dressed as hoplites, where the natives and the animals are set against an exotic background or in the wilderness.The names of the animals are written in Greek, with the intent of striking Roman viewers thought not to have much knowledge of African zoology. Greek merchants and mercenary soldiers had settled in the Nile Delta as early as the 7th century B.C., but Egypt was Hellenized only after its conquest by Alexander the Great, in 332 B.C.The process, accomplished under the Ptolemies, gave rise to syncretic phenomena in art and religion. These rulers’ patronage soon attracted scholars, men of letters and scientists to the learned and sophisticated city of Alexandria. Founded in 331 B.C., Alexandria became one of the most important hubs outside Greece for disseminating the various trends in Hellenistic culture, as well as a centre for experimental science. Seafaring and trade with distant lands encouraged the compilation of geographic works that were illustrated with maps and charts drawn on sheets of papyrus. One such map - of the Iberian peninsula, copied from one drawn by the geographer Artemidoros of Ephesus - recently made the headlines when the San Paolo Company bought it for Turin’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.The drawings of animals on this kind of map are in the artistic, naturalistic and educational tradition influenced by Aristotle’s works. The contacts existing between Praeneste and Egypt, prerequisite for the creation of this masterpiece, were related to the Levantine trade that Praenestine merchants engaged in after the opening of the free port of Delos, in 166 B.C., and that flourished to such extent as to persuade the Praenestines to equate the cult of Fortuna Primigenia, the most important local divinity, with that of Isis. The mosaic was installed as the flooring of the circular part of the Aula Absidata, a hall that looked out over the city’s forum from the short side of the Basilica. It was “discovered” sometime between 1558 and 1604,and was made public by Federico Cesi,who was in Palestrina in 1614 for his wedding with Artemisia Colonna.

On that occasion, he studied the mosaic and asked Cassiano Dal Pozzo to copy it; the artist produced eighteen drawings. The mosaic was detached from its site in 1624-26, restored in Rome in 1640 by Giovanni Battista Calandra and brought back to Palestrina in 1640, then removed in 1855 to undergo a second restoration, and again during World War II. It was badly damaged by its detachment and travels, and has many gaps and additions. In the lower part, for instance, the section depicting a papyrus boat and a banquet scene beneath a cane arbour was replaced after the original one, bought by the grand duke of Tuscany,was sold to the Berlin museums.The precious drawings made in Dal Pozzo’s workshop before the 17th-century restoration, which show how the mosaic was originally composed, are now at Windsor Castle. The rediscovery and publication of Artemidoros’s papyrus (1st-2nd century B.C.) have aroused interest in ancient geographic studies containing information on animals. The Turin papyrus includes some forty sketches of real, imaginary and mythical animals: a sort of catalogue of subjects that craftsmen could offer to depict in frescoes and mosaics.As in the Palestrina mosaic and in the frieze on Marissa’s tomb (3rd-2nd century B.C.), likewise in Palestrina, each animal in the Turin papyrus has its name written in Greek beside it. The studies conducted to establish the context of Artemidoros’s papyrus enable us to understand more fully the meaning and the importance of the Palestrina mosaic. It was created on site (as evidenced by its shape and dimensions, which coincide with those of the apse), presumably between the second and the first century B.C.,by a generation of artists trained after the landscape painter Demetrios the Topographer came to Rome.

It proves that during the reign of Ptolemy VIII (145-116 B.C.), who received a diplomatic mission sent by Scipio Emilianus in 139 B.C., Palestrina had a strong bent for Egypt that revolved around the cult of Isis, to whom the Aula Absidiata may have been dedicated.The circumstance is confirmed by a pair of red granite obelisks discovered in 1791 and 1881 in the area of the city’s ancient forum, beneath the present-day Piazza Regina Margherita. Unfortunately, the obelisks were separated from each other; one is now in the Naples Archaeological Museum and the other in the Palestrina Museum. The hieroglyphics contain, in a Roman imitation, a quote from one T. Sextus Africanus. This was the name of one of Caesar’s legates in Gaul and of a Roman consul operating in Egypt in 50 A.D. The consul may have been the person who dedicated the obelisks, if the inscriptions indeed refer to the reign of Claudius, as they apparently do.