Detail Of A Pebble Mosaic At Pella in Macedonia (c.300 B.C.). The mosaic, which formed the centrepiece of a floor in a grand town-
house, depicted a lion-hunt, a subject which became popular in the arts following Alexander's conquest of the Persian kingdom. The
figures were carried out in natural pebbles of various colours; salient details were outlined with thin strips of terracotta or lead.
Echoes of panel-painting in other media vary in value. A small group of polychrome vases manufactured in Centuripae in Sicily
during the third and early second centuries carries figures in naturalistic colours, but compositions are simple and backgrounds a
uniform reddish pink. More important, as we have seen, are floor mosaics. From the pebbled pavements of Pella, dated round the
turn of the fourth and third centuries, through to the tessera emblemata (inserts) of Delos and other cities in the second century, we
have an impressive sequence of mosaic pictures in which pictorial devices such as modelling in light and shade were freely exploited.
The early examples are subject to certain conventions which were probably rare in painting, notably an undifferentiated blue-black
background (paralleled, however, in the frieze of a newly excavated tomb at Vergina); and the placing of these pictures at the centre
of a floor, framed by bands of abstract pattern, scrollwork, or simply a patchwork of stone fragments set in mortar, produces a totally
different aesthetic effect from that of a painting hung on a wall; but many of the later examples, such as the little New Comedy
tableaux of Dioscurides of Samos from the so-called Villa of Cicero at Pompeii, achieve a remarkable fidelity to the brushwork of
the painter. Particularly famous in antiquity was a pavement by a certain 'Sosos' at Pergamum in which an emblema representing
doves perched on the edge of a bowl was set in a surround decorated to suggest litter from the dining-table. This 'Unswept Saloon'
demonstrates that mosaic pictures were usually intended to be viewed by diners reclining on couches placed on the more plainly
decorated outer edges of the floor. The transference of pictorial emphasis from vertical to horizontal surfaces is also partly explained
by the contemporary vogue for masonry-style wall-decorations in which there was little room for representational art. But the idea of
decorating a pavement with refuse reflects a more general aspect of Hellenistic times: a tendency towards the 'trivialization' of art. It
is the same spirit which produces sleeping hermaphrodites, drunken fauns, and playful centaurs in sculpture, and which concentrates
upon technical tricks and virtuosity at the expense of depth of meaning.