Floor Mosaic with Mask of Bearded Man (Oceanus?)

Roman art

This mosaic, displayed in Room 7 along with two similar ones of sea divinities, seems to be from a more complex composition that decorated the floor of a large Roman villa discovered in the eighteenth century on the Borghese estate at Castell’Arcione, along Via Tiburtina. It depicts a bearded male head, described in lively hues and crowned with a seaweed diadem, against a monochrome black background. Although the attributes of Oceanus are absent, the shape of the beard, which expands at the end in pointed locks, and the inclusion of sea plants point to the iconographic model for the divinity. Based on stylistic analysis, the emblema might date to the third century CE.

Object details

Commentary

This mosaic depicts a bearded male head against a black background with a modern frame. His hair is held by a light-green seaweed crown, while his beard, composed of grey tesserae streaked with white and grey-brown tesserae with hints of yellow, expands at the bottom in pointed locks. In the middle, a lock composed of brown tesserae provides light chromatic contrast. As for the face, the figure has a prominent nose, wide eyes looking to the right and a partially open mouth that reveals two teeth separated by a wide gap. Locks of hair, rendered in reddish brown with hints of grey, escape from beneath the crown.

The figure lacks some of the characteristics typical of images of Oceanus, but the shape of the beard, which almost seems to evoke the movement of the waves of the sea, supports the identification. Two other mosaics from the same location and depicting sea divinities are also displayed in Room 7.

In 1940, Marion Elizabeth Blake advanced the theory, accepted by other scholars, that the three mosaics came from a single, vast composition, along with two others, depicting fishing scenes, inserted into the floor in Room 5 (Blake 1940, p. 117). The latter decorated a Roman villa found in the eighteenth century on the Borghese estate at Castell’Arcione, on Via Tiburtina (Visconti, Lamberti 1796, p. 38; Mari 1983, pp. 250–251, 258-260; Moreno, Sforzini 1987, p. 345).

The three panels with sea divinities were inserted into the floor of the Sala Egizia when the residence underwent a major renovation in the eighteenth century, a project led by the architect Antonio Asprucci (Visconti, Lamberti 1796, p. 74).

Blake also points out the dark background and irregular size of the tesserae, which she holds were typical of Hellenistic mosaic production, which arrived in Italy in the third century CE; the same observation was made in 1966 by Klaus Parlasca (Blake 1940, p. 107).

The Borghese emblema can be compared, especially in terms of its technical features, to a mosaic of the same subject from Tusculum and dated, like the present mosaic, to the third century CE (Paribeni 1932, p. 256, no. 795.)

Giulia Ciccarello