https://hestia-blog.squarespace.com/blog/The Nile Mosaic at Palestrina

Textual criticism is all about establishing what an ancient author actually wrote. At De bello ciuili I 217, did Lucan write tunc (meaning ‘then’) or tum (also meaning ‘then’)? And does it matter? If an editor is trying to determine an author’s preferred style or identify changes in his (or her) preferences over the course of a work, yes, it does. Furthermore, in an age in which we are very careful to attribute to modern speakers and authors their exact words, it is by extension natural to want to honour an ancient author with exact quotation. But does uncertainty as to whether Lucan wrote tunc or tum negate the value of reading De bello civili? Is the power and audacity of that poem rendered less if we print tum when Lucan actually dictated tunc to his amanuensis, or vice versa? Surely the answer is ‘no’.

One of the most reassuring aspects of archaeology is that in a site with proper stratigraphy we can be 99% certain that what we dig up from an identifiably ancient layer must be ancient, so that—lo and behold!—the problem of determining authenticity has disappeared like a puff of smoke. (A site severely disturbed by landslide or ploughing or some similar violence is, of course, a different story.) But what if something was dug up before people cared about stratigraphy? Or what if an artefact has come down to us without any provenance at all? What if it has been repaired in such way that we may not be able to tell what the original looked like? Such is the case with the Nile Mosaic from Palestrina (5.85 x 4.3 m.), that intricate assemblage of discrete cameos of human and animal life up the river, from the Hellenized urban setting at the bottom to the hinterland of Ethiopia at the top, the animals (but not the humans) carefully labelled in Greek (Fig. 1). If the authenticity of the details on this exquisite artefact cannot be trusted, how are we then to approach it?

This work of art invites lingering contemplation, cameo by cameo. In the lower register, the river, hippo- and crocodile-infested, flows past Greek temples and kiosks, past rustic huts, to lap against a Nilometer on the extreme left. From there it winds the width of the mosaic to the far right, where an imposing Pharaonic building with characteristic Egyptian pylons marks the end of the urban context, while the figures of tiny hunters immediately behind it signal the boundary of the wilderness, bifurcated by the river zigzagging to the skyline. Its floodwaters eddy around rocky outcrops sporting jaunty animals, each cameo obeying its own internal logic of scale and perspective, so that, for example, two gigantic crabs reaching out of the water with their pincers are represented at a scale that far eclipses the rhinoceros immediately below them (Fig. 2). Along the horizon, teams of hunters aim their bows and arrows into a bird-rich sky. Clouds and water, reflecting a similar palette, almost merge. The whole artefact simulates a pictorial effect by means of the tiny tesserae of which it is composed, creating tracks as slender as those of a worm, hence the term opus vermiculatum for its style, ‘worm’s tracery’.

Fig. 2: Wildlife on the Nile, including a rhinoceros and two crabs

This awe-inspiring creation is now mounted on the wall on the top floor of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Palestrina, above the remains of the Hellenistic sanctuary of Fortuna at ancient Praeneste. Standing in front of it, it is impossible not to fall under the spell of its imaginative rendering of the course of the longest river known to the Romans and the Greeks. Originally cut into the living rock in the apse of a rectangular hall on the north side of the forum at Praeneste, the mosaic was subsequently incorporated into the basement of the bishop’s palace. In the early seventeenth century it was chopped into pieces for removal to Rome, where it was restored by an expert mosaicist at the Vatican. But on its return journey to Palestrina, a mere 40 km away, its packing must have been severely jolted, because by the time it was unpacked, parts of it had been reduced to jumbled heaps of tesserae.

Before the accident, the mosaic had already suffered violence. An entire scene, the picnic under the pergola in the foreground, had been cut out and sent to Ferdinand II de’ Medici as a gift, although an exact copy was inserted into the mosaic, rendering it impossible for an untrained eye to detect the substitution—a reminder that ‘authenticity’ was a different concept in the seventeenth century from what it is today (Fig. 3). (The original piece can be seen in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin.) Moreover, drawings made for the scholar and patron of the arts, Cassiano dal Pozzo, before the mosaic’s fateful removal to Rome show that parts of the composition as restored after the accident differ radically from the original. One entire section, depicting a parasol, is missing, and there are abrupt breaks in narrative continuity elsewhere that suggest imperfect restoration. In the seventeenth century, restorers followed their own aesthetic principles, visible in other media, such as sculpture. How, then, looking at the Nile Mosaic today, can we determine either the intentions of the artists or the reactions of an ancient viewer? Should we even try? Or, for that matter, what are we to make of it ourselves, when there are so few certainties on which we can base our judgement?

The drawings commissioned by dal Pozzo, while short of photographic accuracy, help to authenticate some of the details, and modern scholars have been able to hazard some reconstructions based on his portfolio. They can also have recourse to logical deduction: how likely is it that a restorer in the eighteenth century would come up with the label ΛΥΝΞ, showing the nasal nu not yet rendered gamma before xi (Fig. 4)? But, beyond these specific parameters, maybe the analogy with textual criticism can help. Even in an error-ridden text, judgements can still be made, although they should be expressed cautiously in phrasing such as, ‘If that is what the author wrote’ (or what the artist designed). Are we to banish mention of the female donkey-centaur on the Nile mosaic, along with the erroneously aspirated ὄνος (onos) in its label ΗΟΝΟΚΕΝΤΑΥΡΑ (honocentaura), for fear that its depiction is not how the ancient mosaic workshop conceived the creature? (See Fig. 5.)

Or, to pursue our analogy one step further, would the power and beauty of the object be rendered null and void, if some of the details could be proven to derive from a workshop of the seventeenth century instead of the first? The mosaic has been variously dated from the second century BCE to the time of Hadrian, a span of more than two entire centuries. If that does not enable us to make judgements about fashions in mosaic-laying in precisely the late Republic, or precisely the early Empire, or precisely the reign of Hadrian, maybe we should widen our lens. What can the mosaic tell us about the mystique of Egypt in the Roman era? How does it chime with the fascination of pursuing the Nile to its source? What does it have to do with the encyclopedic impulse in antiquity, documenting the natural world while extolling the virtues of civilization?

The sheer scale of the mosaic and the variety of its colour palette can transport us in our imagination to a place far beyond the outskirts of Rome in the twenty-first century, to a time before the animal kingdom was captured in television documentaries, when the boundary between the exotic and the fantastic was permeable: if a camel-leopard, Κ[]ΜΕΛΟΠΑΡΔΑΛΙ[] (c[]melopardali[], giraffe), was possible, why not a lady centaur (Fig. 5)? If precise features of the religious ceremonies performed in the Hellenized urban centres at the foot of the mosaic are lost to us, does that diminish the religious atmosphere of those temple façades and the rituals being enacted in front of them?

Fig. 5: A lady-centaur (ΗΟΝΟΚΕΝΤΑΥΡΑ) on the Nile

As students and scholars of the ancient world, we are trained to observe detail, analyze it, wrestle it into authentic shape. Instead, the Nile Mosaic demands that we let down our guard, admit defeat, give in to inauthenticity: if this artefact withholds from us the key to its mysteries, that is reason enough to marvel at it, feel humbled by its magnificence, and be refreshed by its naiveté, as it presents us with its engaging vision of one of the fabled natural wonders of the ancient world.

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