What is Mosaic

is the art and craft of making small cubes and using them in the decoration and ornamentation of floor and wall spaces by installing them with tiles over smooth surfaces and forming various designs of different colors. Various materials can be used such as stones for mosaics (marble). Colorful stones made of these materials are usually distributed artistically to express religious, cultural, and artistic values in another influential artistic style.

The mosaic painting is made with large numbers of small colored pieces to finally look like a picture representing landscapes, geometric shapes, human paintings, animals or icons.

Mosaic art dates back to the days of the Sumerians and then the Romans, where the Byzantine era witnessed a great development in the mosaic industry because they introduced glass and metals into its manufacture.
Also, they used mosaics extensively in the third and fourth centuries AD and excelled in depicting sea life, fish, and animals.

Mosaic term:

Its origins go back to the Greek word “Muses”, which means the nine gods of arts, beauty, and artistic inspiration. Its name is verbally associated with the word "Mosaic". This word has reached the Arabic language in the name

“Psephos”, which was later transliterated to become “Fass.” In Greece, this art was known as “Tessera Technique”, and this word is of Latin origin.

It means cubes or dices, which are cubic and regular shapes that are cut out of stones. The mosaic was also called “Opus tesselatum” If the cubes are regular, and “Opus Vermiculatum” If the cubes are irregular.

Mosaic development stages:

The oldest mosaic found in Greece was in the city of Olynthus, in

Fifth and fourth centuries BC. Examples are also found in Olympia, Syria, and Macedonia.

After that, the Roman mosaic spread throughout the Western Roman Empire and to Syria, the Mediterranean Basin, North Africa, and France, between the first and third centuriesAD. The oldest examples of mural mosaics, which goes back to the Roman period and appeared in the first century AD in the city of Bombay in the foundations of a garden.

After that, the use of mosaic became common, especially in the Byzantine state, where there are many examples of this in the Levant, Rome, and other regions under the influence of the Byzantine state.

Mosaic Manufacturing Techniques:

The scientific meaning of the word mosaic was later known by the Romans as “Opus Musivum”, and is usually called a work of art with a coherent shape or a drawing made of small cubes collected together and planted in a strong network that works to hold them together, and it gives either a flat shape or a three-dimensional shape and merges with it to give multiple shapes and decorations. Mosaic art is based on the color and line in the formation of the apparent plastic unit called “The rug” and also called in the Latin language by Romans “Pavimentum Tesseris structum” which means the floor built from small and colorful cubes.

The Romans are credited with these appellations, and they were developed according to their historical sequence:

  1. “Tessellatum Opus”: which is a mosaic executed by square or rectangular surface cubes, measuring approximately 1 cm and arranged in natural lines, usually straight and sometimes curved, and the cubes measure sometimes up to 4 square centimeters.

  2. “Vermiculatum Opus”: which is made up of very small cubes 50 mm and less and cut with high attention. It is used in complex figurative works or in details of faces, people, complex and delicate scenes and the implementation of animal scenes.

  3. (Marmorum): Opus Sectite- Alabaster marble floors(Sectelia Pavimenta) are marble floors based on the color contrast of the pieces. They are organized, unified, or repetitive geometric

designs, which in the archaeological language means the floors resulting from the organization(Sectelia) of marble pieces (Marmoreae) cut in geometric shapes (square, triangle, circular, rectangle, hexagon, octagon).

Most natural materials are used in the manufacture of mosaics, the most important of which are:

Marble stones and rocks:

These stones and rocks are a natural accumulation of various natural materials that appear in the form of a pile. These rocks are divided according to their sources into four types:

  1. Volcanic rocks are derived from a combination of magnetic materials coming from deep impacts and the rocks are: Granite, Syenite, Porvido, Diorite, Basalt, Ardesia.
  2. Sedimentary rocks, which are derived from sediments of various types of materials mixed with water, and the remains of animals and plants, which are incoherent materials.
  3. Metamorphic rocks, which are derived from the two previous groups and from a change according to their original composition and nature, where they are found in areas of strong pressure and high temperature, and their types are: Schist and Quartz.
  4. Rocks extracted from caves in the form of groups or plates on the banks of rivers and seas.

Other materials were also used to make mosaics, which are precious stones such as Agate, Lapis Lazuli, Quartz, and Pearl, in addition to

a new art was used and invented called smalti (which is made of glass that was also used in the technique of Mosaic and called “Pastavitra” a word of Latin origin means(smelting) which are small pieces of glass “Pastavitra”.

It is obtained through the process of smelting sand and oxidized salts with metal components. As a result of this melting, we get a kind of tough, colored, and transparent glass.

Mosaic manufacturing steps:

  1. First, we draw the picture or the subject to be executed in mosaic on a piece of cloth of the size that is intended to be implemented.
  2. Then we divide each color space of the drawing into small sections with the number of sections of the small pieces that will be paved.
  3. After that, we put the colored cubes according to the drawing that was implemented, and this process may need to refine or reduce some pieces, as needed, and then use the adhesive materials.

Mosaic Types:

In the Levant, a large number of beautiful mosaic paintings were discovered in many cities, including Mari, Shahba, Antioch, Sweida, Palmyra, Hama and Aleppo, Maarat Numan. Some of these paintings were transferred to international and local museums, where the largest mosaic panel in the world is located in the Taibat Al-Imam Museum in Syria. The rest of these paintings have been restored and

preserved for future generations to remain a witness to the greatness of the arts and the greatness of the civilization of this country.

In the Greek and Roman period, mosaic art developed to become more beautiful, as mosaics were used as wall paintings to represent the illustrated history.

It was also used in gardens and around fountains, and a variety of materials were used in the manufacture of mosaics, such as shells and precious stones. It was also common to use mosaic cubes cut from stone and marble to form beautiful decorative designs.

The natural colors of stones and other materials were also used, and other materials such as glass were used in this industry during the second century BC.

In the Levant, mosaic was considered one of the finest arts

The ancient Syrians used clear, coordinated colors, and the Byzantines introduced gold and blue.

The use of mosaics in the Byzantine period was common in the interior decoration of churches due to the suitability of this art and the possibility of covering large areas inside churches.

The floors, ceilings and walls were decorated with mosaic panels. They were also used to cover the temple area and the apse, which are the most important parts of the church.

The Byzantine and Syrian artist used colors and degrees in order to develop geometric shapes and show the third dimension in them. They also used small stones to show the details of the face, and

sometimes the stones were cut into different shapes In order to fill all the voids in the surface and take multiple shapes, including triangles, and multi-angled, to form circles and zigzag lines until the desired shape appears closer to the drawing.