During 19th-century excavations at Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was buried in volcanic ash in 79 C.E. after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, an ancient Roman mosaic featuring Alexander the Great was uncovered.
Now, researchers have found out that the artwork’s stones originated from quarries across Europe and North Africa. The revelation was made as part of an ongoing restoration project.
The 2,000-year-old mosaic was discovered in 1831 within the floor of a mansion in Pompeii known as the House of the Faun.
About a decade later, it was brought to the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, where it has been kept ever since.
According to the museum, the mosaic has been undergoing an extensive conservation process since 2020. It was first examined using noninvasive methods, such as infrared thermography, video microscopy, and portable X-ray fluorescence.
In a new study, researchers detected 10 colors of tesserae in the mosaic. There were shades of blue, yellow, red, pink, green, white, black, gray, brown, and a variety of micro-textures. The mosaic depicts Alexander the Great fighting in the Battle of Issus in 333 B.C.E.
The scene shows him wielding a long spear, surrounded by fighting soldiers. The Persian king Darius III was opposite him. During the battle, Alexander fought the Persian leader and won.
He continued moving eastward to conquer more territory. By the end of his life in 323 B.C.E., Alexander had established an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to the region that is now Pakistan.
“The Alexander mosaic is one of the most impressive artworks of…antiquity by any standard and the most important mosaic of the Roman age,” wrote the researchers of the study.
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“The image of Alexander depicted in the central scene of the mosaic is perhaps the most iconic and well-known representation of his face in ancient art.”
In the Roman Empire, mosaics were a highly popular form of art. It is when artisans pioneered tesserae, which are cubes of glass, stone, and ceramic. Today, mosaics are some of the best-preserved pieces of Roman art.
The creators of the Alexander mosaic took great care with his face. They used several different hues of pink tesserae to put his face together. The color variation is likely due to the unique chemical compositions of the stones that were incorporated.
Experts discovered natural wax and gypsum on the surface of the mosaic. The substances were probably left over from previous conservation efforts.
The mosaic’s tesserae material was sorted into four categories: vitreous (glass-like), calcium carbonate-based, silicate-based, and a combination of the last two.
The researchers concluded that the rocks came from Greece, Italy, Tunisia, or the Iberian Peninsula based on similarities between the tesserae and mining areas around the Mediterranean region.
Some of the white tesserae looked like Marmor Lunensis, a marble that was extracted from quarries in Italy’s Apuan Alps.
The Romans mined there between the 1st century B.C.E. and the 3rd century B.C.E. The darker pink stones may be Marmo Rosa, which comes from Portugal, while the paler pinks may be Breccia Nuvolata marble from the Mediterranean.
The study was published in the journal PLOS One.
