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The Design of the Roman Mosaic at Hinton St. Mary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2011

K. S. Painter
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Summary

Two problems in the design of the Hinton St. Mary mosaic are (1) that the elements of the design are placed the wrong way round if the mosaic was planned to be seen like a carpet; and (2) whether the bust of Christ is an original design or whether it is based on a formal set of rules. There is evidence to suggest (1) that the design of the mosaic as a whole may have been conceived as the decoration of a ceiling, and (2) that rules to which the bust of Christ conforms were still in use in the eighteenth century in Byzantine church-painting, and that there is a genuine continuity between the two points in time.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 49 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1976

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References

page 49 note 1 Toynbee, J. M. C., ‘A New Roman Mosaic Pavement Found in Dorset’, in J.R.S. liv (1964), 7–14Google Scholar; Painter, K. S., ‘The Roman Site at Hinton St. Mary, Dorset’, in B.M.Q. xxxii (1967), 15–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 49 note 2 For recent considerations of the problems on the Continent and their effect see Wightman, E. M., Roman Trier and the Treveri (London, 1970), pp. 52 ff.Google Scholar, and Branigan, K., ‘Gauls in Gloucestershire?’, in Trans. B. and G. Arch. Soc. xcii for 1973 (1974), 82–95Google Scholar.

page 49 note 3 Smith, D. J., ‘Three Fourth-Century Schools of Mosaic in Roman Britain’, in La Mosaïque Gréco-Romaine (Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1965), pp. 95–116Google Scholar; Parlasca, K., Die römischen Mosaiken in Deutschland (Römisch-Germanische Forschungen, Band 23, Berlin, 1959), pp. 34–5 and 55–6Google Scholar.

page 49 note 4 Kitzinger, E., ‘Stylistic Developments in Pavement Mosaics in the Greek East from the Age of Constantine to the Age of Justinian’, in La Mosaïque Gréco-Romaine (Paris, 1965), pp. 341–52Google Scholar; Toynbee, J. M. C., Art of the Romans (London, 1965), pp. 146–57Google Scholar.

page 49 note 5 Lavin, I., ‘The Hunting Mosaics of Antioch and their Sources’, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, xvii (1963), 181–286.Google Scholar

page 49 note 6 Toynbee, J. M. C. in J.R.S. liv (1964), 7–8Google Scholar; Smith, D. J., ‘The Mosaic Pavements’, in Rivet, A. L. F. (ed.), The Roman Villa in Britain (London, 1969), pp. 71–125, esp. p. 104.Google Scholar

page 52 note 1 For the architectural problems see Krautheimer, R., Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (Penguin Books, 1965), esp. pp. 171 ff.Google Scholar

page 52 note 2 Lehmann, Karl, ‘The Dome of Heaven’, in The Art Bulletin, xxvii (March, 1945) 1–27, especially 5 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lehmann points out that L. Curtius was one of the first to draw attention to the persistent relationship between ceilings and floor decorations in Römische Mitteilungen, l (1935), pp. 348 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 52 note 3 An art of this type had become dominant in Syria and northern Mesopotamia around the third century A.D. and remained important after the Islamic conquest of the area. It also affected developments very far afield, from Rome in th e west to Afghanistan in the east and from Egypt in the south to Russia in the north. In the Syrian area the style was first defined by Rostovtzeff as ‘Parthian’; but the term is not wholly satisfactory, for in the art of the Parthian era frontality was not universal. Talbot Rice has reasonably suggested that a better. term is the ‘Syrian style’. See Rostovtzeff, M., Dura-Europos and its Art (Oxford, 1938)Google Scholar, and Perkins, Ann, The Art of Dura-Europos (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar.

page 53 note 1 Hetherington, P., The Painter's Manual of Dionysius of Fourna (London, Sagittarius Press, 1974)Google Scholar, especially the cannon of proportions of the human figure, p. 12, section 103 (61).

page 53 note 2 Panofsky, E., ‘History of the Theory of Human Proportions’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1970), pp. 82–138Google Scholar; first published as ‘Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehre als Abbild der Stilentwicklung’, in Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, xiv (1921), 188–219Google Scholar.

page 53 note 3 Polyclitus, according to Galen (Placita Hippocratis et Platonis v, 3), described the proper proportion of finger to finger, finger to hand, hand to forearm, forearm to arm and, finally, each single limb to the entire body. He had thus abandoned the idea of constructing the body on the basis of an absolute module. Vitruvius (i, 2; iii, 1) similarly formulates data regarding human proportions as common fractions of the body length.

page 54 note 1 Simon, M., Geschichte der Mathematik im Altertum im Verbindung mil antiker Kulturgeschichte (Berlin, 1909), pp. 348, 357Google Scholar. Panofsky believed that the origin of the tradition represented by Cennini and Dionysius is to be found in Arabia because in the writings of the ‘Brethren of Purity’, an Arabian scholarly brotherhood that flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries, we find a system of proportions that expressed the dimensions of the body by one fairly large unit: Dieterici, F., Die Propädeutik der Araber (Leipzig, 1865), pp. 135 ffGoogle Scholar. It does not seem to follow, however, that the origin of the idea lay necessarily in the east in classical times even though the tradition was preserved there in the ninth and tenth centuries.

page 54 note 2 I owe particular thanks to my colleagues Mr. P. C. Compton, who made the drawings, and to Miss C. M. Johns and Dr. I. A. Kinnes for helpful criticism and advice.