314 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2'»d s. VII. April IG. '59. 



with gold and silver is of remote antiquity, and was 

 carried to great perfection. The introduction of 

 these beautiful carpets, replete with all their odd 

 imaginations of fabulous animals, and combina- 

 tions of more beauty than taste, into refined 

 Greece, led to a more permanent and elegant 

 imitation of these rich and gaudy carpeting in 

 coloured stone, glass, enamel and similar durable 

 materials. This art was known to the Phceni- 

 cians, but the Greeks achieved its greatest perfec- 

 tion. 



From Greece this art, with every other particle 

 of useful and ornamental knowledge, passed into 

 Rome with the spoils taken from the Greeks by 

 their Roman conquerors towards the end of the 

 Republic. Among these treasures they trans- 

 ported to Rome many of the beautiful tesselated 

 pavements ; and Sylia is reported to have been 

 the first Roman who caused a musaic pavement 

 to be executed in Italy for the Temple of Fortune 

 at Pra>neste, the modern Palestrina, of which a 

 large portion still exists. 



At the first introduction of Grecian art and 

 embellishments into Italy, the Romans confined 

 the use of these tasteful pavements to the space 

 between the walls of their buildings, and used 

 tesserge only in the flioors. As wealth and lux'ury 

 increased, they ornamented the walls and arched 

 roofs of their saloons with musaic work of the 

 most elaborate and tasteful description. 



The superb tents of the Roman generals were 

 also paved in this manner to exclude the damp of 

 the earth, such as have been discovered in Eng- 

 land, and as Suetonius relates of the tent of Julius 

 Caesar. 



Of the name given to this ancient art. Dr. 

 Johnson conceives its appellative mosaic to be a 

 corruption of musaic ; but the dictionary of the 

 French academy defines " Mosa'ique, qui vient de 

 Mo'ise, la loi Mosa'ique." 



Our application of this word mosaic has been 

 equally erroneous, and some writers have attri- 

 buted its etymon to the skilful artificers employed 

 by Moses in the construction of the Tabernacle, 

 the ark, the jewelled breastplate and the habili- 

 ments of Aaron, and such like. 



The Germans distinguish these words more cor- 

 rectly, calling the first mosaisch; and the art, Mu- 

 sivarbiel, opus musivum, musivamaJderet/, pictura 

 musiva. It is not of mosaic, but of musaic that I 

 am about to write. 



This art is at once so minute and so large that 

 it might contain a picture composed of innumer- 

 able pieces of coloured fragments scarcely larger 

 than a silver penny or a lady's breastpin, and 

 might be called micrographia, or it might be ap- 

 plied to the pavement of a museurh of a larger 

 circumference than the Roman Colosseum, 



" Which in its public shows unpeopled Rome, 

 And held unnurab'red nations in its womb." 



Then, again, its materials may vary, from the 

 pebbles and shells and segments of wood used by 

 suburban citizens to decorate their fore-courts 

 and summer-houses, to the ornamental tiles of 

 entrance halls, lobbies and corridors, to the her- 

 ring-bone brick paving in wash-houses, and the 

 Dutch clinkers of stables ; from the potter s plas- 

 tic clay to the most precious marbles, from the 

 spotless Parian to the rich Siennese, lapidary's 

 lathe-shaping and polishing the gems of Golconda ; 

 from twenty pennies the square yard to a thou- 

 sand guineas the square incli. 



Another merit of unappreciable value belongs 

 to this art : should the picture be damaged by 

 age, by friction, or by any other cause, its whole 

 surface may be rubbed down to the depth of the 

 injuries, repolished and made as good as at first ; 

 a process that would be fatal to an oil painting, 

 where the flaying said to have been inflicted on 

 some of the choicest works of Rubens, Titian, 

 Guido, &c., by modern picture-cleaners, whose 

 self-called restorations have been anathematised 

 by every knowing connoisseur. 



Musaicum, the name of the art in question, Is 

 derived by Junius and other philologists from Mu- 

 caixov, opus musivum, and ixoixtov, bright, elegant, 

 highly finished : hence museum, a temple or place 

 devoted to the Muses. I have recorded in Arts 

 and Artists (vol. i. p. 97.), that a noble lord was 

 laughed at in the House of Peers for calling it 

 musaic ; and regret that, although it was at the 

 time (about the spring of 1825) of suflicient noto- 

 riety, that I did not make a more particular note 

 of it. 



Pliny, in noticing that the Greeks were the first 

 who pi'actised this art, mentions a curious specimen 

 called the unswept floor, which represented crumbs 

 of bread and such things as fall fiom a table ; and 

 were, he says, so naturally represented that the 

 spectators believed, on entering the room, that the 

 floor had been left unswept. 



When the fine arts in Italy fell into decadence 

 in the middle ages, the Byzantine Greeks re- 

 sumed this art, and decorated the altars and sanc- 

 tuaries of their churches with musaic pictures, 

 copied from the hard and gaudy paintings of the 

 times and style of Cimabue. It was first revived 

 towards the end of the thirteenth century by An- 

 drea TaflS, an Italian, who was taught the art by 

 Apollonlus, a native of Greece, who had acquired 

 his knowledge in that country. He decorated 

 the church of St. Mark at Venice with some of 

 his finest works. To show the durability of this 

 art, some of these musaics, and particularly a fine 

 pavement in that church, is still in fine preserva- 

 tion, although executed nearly 600 years ago. 



The church of St. Domenicho at Siena boasted 

 of a peculiarly fine musaic pavement, executed 

 by Duccio da Siena in 1350, under the altar of 

 St. Ausano ; and, in 1424, another was executed 



