Carlton Hobbs 9127

October 30 2009, 12:56pm

Term of the Day: Tessera 10/30/09

The top of a walnut x-form center table with inset ancient mosaic fragment.

A tessera is a tile in a mosaic. Tesserae can be made of stone, glass, or ceramic. Some of the earliest mosaics were made of pebbles, but by 200 BC tesserae in Greek floor mosaics were being cut in a cube shape from marble or other relatively soft stones. These kinds of mosaics spread throughout the Roman Empire in the following centuries, and were typically found in domestic settings, with the most elaborate mosaics appearing in the most elite households. Colored glass tesserae first developed in Rome in the early centuries BC, and were used mostly for splashes of color in the floor mosaics, which were still mostly made up of stone, or for wall mosaics, which could be made entirely of the more fragile glass, without much danger of breaking. The present tabletop is made of a fragment of an ancient Roman mosaic that was probably on the floor of a dwelling such as the Casa Rural das Ruinas in Milreu, Portugal, where very similar floor mosaics are still visible in the ruins of the dwelling's water sanctuary. After the 4th century, gold and silver leaf began to be added to the tesserae: these came to be used frequently in Byzantine mosaics, to create their characteristic solid backgrounds of gold.

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