Under Another Sky (31 page)

The son of a clerical family from Gloucestershire, Lysons studied law in London, and also painting, under Joshua Reynolds. His own portrait, made by Thomas Lawrence, shows a plainly dressed, wirily handsome man with a penetratingly intelligent gaze. His skill as a draughtsman and his love of the antique united gloriously in his masterpiece:
Reliquiae Britannico-Romanae
, a three-volume work published between 1813 and 1817 in lavish elephant folio. It contains exquisite engravings of the remains he excavated, including a
representation of the Woodchester mosaic over two spreads, the pages folding out to reveal the design on a luxurious scale. Orpheus sits this time not in the very middle of the composition (as in the Barton Farm mosaic, which is so stylistically similar it must have been produced by the same workshop, and possibly for the same client) but just off centre, among the birds. He is encircled again by great prowling felines and a griffin, as well as by a stag and a shaggy-coated bear. That outer circle is banded by a guilloche and a generous acanthus border. In the spandrels – the corners of the enclosing square – are nymphs, pale-skinned on a dark ground, barely draped in fleeting lengths of fabric.

Lysons devoted a complete work to his study of Woodchester: it is another splendid volume, beginning with an engraving of himself sketching, in breeches and frock coat, among the villa ruins, the church in the background. Dispassionately, he explained how he was able to access the Orpheus mosaic: ‘On the digging of a vault for the interment of the late John Wade esquire, of Pudhill, at the depth of four feet below the surface of the ground, so considerable a portion of the same pavement was laid open, as, together with other openings, which were made in the course of that and the following year, enabled me to ascertain its form and dimensions.’ He concluded that the pavement was, ‘for size and richness of ornament … equalled by few of those discovered in other provinces of the Roman Empire, and is undoubtedly superior to any thing of the same kind found in this country’. He called it the Great Pavement.

Lysons’s account and careful recording of what he found is of immeasurable importance – not least because the mosaic rests to this day under the earth, among the dead of Woodchester. It has from time to time been uncovered: the last occasion was in 1973, when 141,000 people visited and the village groaned under the footfall. There are no plans for it to be revealed again. Among those who did see it then was a local builder called Bob Woodward. He then owned a construction firm with his brother, John; when we met, in the summer of 2010, he was the very image of the prosperous retired businessman, in neatly pressed trousers and sports jacket, speaking with a Bristolian’s angular vowels. In 1973, the brothers were then working at Wotton-under-Edge, a market town on the southern edge of the Cotswolds. When a friend of theirs came to visit from Brighton, Bob decided to take him to Woodchester to see the mosaic. ‘In fact it didn’t mean
much to me,’ he told me, ‘because I had never seen a Roman mosaic before.’

When he got there, ‘I was absolutely mesmerised by it,’ Woodward said. ‘Being in the building trade and looking at a building that had been there for sixteen or seventeen hundred years, I was amazed at the craftsmanship of the men who had made the mosaic. At the same time I was so angry that so much of the original was broken up, mostly by gravediggers. You could see coffin-shaped areas where tesserae were missing. When I was driving back to Wotton-under-Edge I said to my friend: “I’ve got to do something about that; what a great challenge it would be to remake it.” My friend answered, “You’d have to be crazy to do that.” And I thought to myself, perhaps I’ve got the qualifications.’

So began a project magnificent in its ambition. Woodward persuaded his brother that they were to transform themselves from builders into accomplished mosaicists. They managed it: it took a decade and 1.6 million tesserae to re-create, at full size, the fourth-century Great Pavement. While Woodward and I were talking, we were standing on his mosaic, as big as a ballroom, its surface both cool and inviting and somehow as thickly luxurious as a carpet. At the time, it was on display at Prinknash Abbey, outside Gloucester, just before being put up for auction by its then owner (Woodward had long ago sold it). It was bought by an anonymous buyer for £75,000. The villagers at Woodchester had tried to acquire it, but were outbid, and it has now disappeared from public view.

Remaking the mosaic presented innumerable technical challenges. While the original was still exposed, the brothers were granted permission by its legal owner, the rector of the parish, to have it carefully photographed. After endless experimentation and many false starts, they invented a process whereby a projector sunk some feet below ground would reproduce the image of a section of the mosaic on to tracing paper placed atop a sheet of armour-plated glass. ‘We wanted to make something that was really authentic,’ he said. ‘We didn’t want people to say, “It probably looks from a distance like the one at Woodchester, it gives the overall impression of it.” No, we wanted to do an in-depth study into the mosaic and to be able to explain our idea to people who know far more about mosaics than we were ever likely to know and to get their backing.’ Rather than sourcing coloured
stone for the tesserae, they commissioned a potter in south Wales, who provided clay in the various shades they required. ‘We got five tons fired up and ended up using twelve tons.’ They made the mosaic in sections, so it could be jigsawed together. At first the tesserae buckled and curled on their backings; this, like many other problems, the brothers solved by patient trial and error.

Forty per cent of the original mosaic had been destroyed over the centuries; so Woodward set about researching the lost sections – from drawings made by Lysons and his predecessors, and when that failed, from other similar mosaics made nearby, such as that from Barton Farm. ‘I left school at fourteen, so I had no idea about how you go into the Bodleian Library and how you get the right book. My old headmaster used to say to me, “Keep your head up, Woodward, there’s nothing in it.”’ But Woodward found himself metamorphosing into a scholar, working in the libraries at the Ashmolean Museum and the Society of Antiquaries in London. He pursued the theory, first put forward in the 1960s, that the reason Orpheus was not dead centre of the composition was that there had once been a fountain set there – which is now generally accepted by archaeologists. After the mosaic was re-created, ‘I was invited to speak at the Getty Museum in Malibu in 1985 – and I think, though I say it myself, I stole the show,’ he said.

Remaking the mosaic taught the brothers to look – really look – at it. ‘If you are going to make it, you have to understand it,’ he said. As they went on – embodying, re-enacting the work of the original craftsmen – they discovered the mosaicists’ tricks. For example: the elaborate square panels that border the composition must have been made from the outside working in, for in their centre comes what Woodward called a ‘release panel’ – a rectangular section that could work at any width, thus accommodating variations or inaccuracies in the neighbouring panels. Woodward paced around, showing me his favourite parts: ‘the gorgeous pheasant with a ring around his neck’; ‘the colours in the tigress and the lion’s flowing mane’. He told me how he had reconstructed what in the original was a headless, limbless Orpheus, using the Barton Farm mosaic as his guide. As we spoke, I remembered the full story of Orpheus’s death in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
: he was ripped apart, his limbs scattered, by furious maenads. Only in the afterlife was he reassembled, a ghostly metamorphosis.

What is striking to me about the mosaics of Roman Britain is how completely
Roman
they are. The Orpheus pavements of the Cotswolds are not greatly different from those of Sicily, in Palermo and Piazza Armerina – certainly in terms of their iconography if not in complexity or skill of execution. There are some Romano-British mosaics, though, that strike a rather different note. In the Hull and East Riding Museum there is an exceptional collection, including a vivid depiction of a chariot race, found when gardeners were digging a kitchen garden at Horkstow Hall in Lincolnshire in 1797, a print of which was published by Lysons in 1801. But the mosaic known as the Rudston Venus is something quite distinct. Here Venus is not an elegant classical creature, but a rather curious pear-shaped figure, with a large belly and bottom, tiny feet and breasts, and a crudely depicted pubic triangle. In her right hand, apparently balanced on the very tip of her finger, is a round object that might be the golden apple from the Garden of the Hesperides that she claimed when Paris judged her to be the most beautiful of goddesses. From her other hand drops a large tennis-racquet-shaped item, which may be a mirror. Next to her – perhaps what has caused her to let fall her mirror in surprise – is a triton,
fish-tailed and human from the waist up. Around this central section are scenes from the amphitheatre. A lion, somewhat resembling a dachshund with its long body and short legs, has a spear protruding from its body. There is a bull, with the words
‘TAURUS OMICIDA’
picked out in tesserae, meaning the ‘murderous bull’, or ‘the bull called Man-eater’ – except that the M and the Us have been given cross-strokes (like the letter A), suggesting, perhaps, that the craftsman was unlettered. A rectangular panel at one end of the composition shows the head and shoulders of a figure with Mercury’s snake-wreathed staff, the caduceus. But from his helmet, oak leaves rather than wings sprout, as if the craftsman has mistaken a detail he has seen in a pattern book. The work looks very much as if it has been made by local, British craftsmen. Even so, despite the apparent crudeness of the depiction, there is nothing un-Roman about the iconography of the Rudston Venus. The scenes shown here would be readable to anyone in the Roman empire.

The heirs to the work of Samuel Lysons are two archaeologists, David Neal and Stephen Cosh, who have recorded, illustrated, described and discussed every single known Roman mosaic in Britain, gathering evidence, too, about those long ago destroyed. Over the course of fifteen years (and two lifetimes of expertise) they have together produced
Roman Mosaics of Britain
, a four-volume work published by the Society of Antiquaries. By the time they reached the final volume, they were obliged to add an appendix containing discoveries that had been made since they began. The work is a remarkable act of devotion to the objects that give us the clearest idea of the nature of artistic work in Roman Britain.

Turning the pages of Neal and Cosh’s volumes, it seems extraordinary that so many tessellated pavements have survived, from the three entries from Scotland (one recording two lonely glass tesserae found in Castlecary on the Antonine Wall) to the bafflingly peculiar mosaic of Brading, on the Isle of Wight, which shows a cockerel-headed man beside a pair of griffins, interpreted variously as an Egyptian religious scene, a North African-style gladiatorial contest, or the Gnostic deity Abraxas. But there have also been tremendous losses. Obliteration is as much a feature of Romano-British mosaics as survival.

In 1805, Edward Donovan, an Irish scholar best known for his twenty-volume work on the zoology of Britain, published an account
of a journey he had taken through Wales, including a visit to Caerwent, the Roman town of Venta Silurum, which lies a little east of Chepstow in Monmouthshire. Unlike Silchester, Wroxeter and Caistor St Edmund, a village sprang up on the site of the town – but a modest one, so that the encircling Roman walls run at times through open fields. Wandering round the village and the local farms, Donovan noted the ‘mutilated remains of a noble capital, and shaft of a pillar’ that served ‘to support a wheat-stack’. The pillar’s ignoble recycling was, he thought, ‘evidently derogatory to the first intention of the sculptor’ but at least rendered the crops ‘above the reach of the host of little plunderers, which the cautious farmer has to guard against’. He then made his way to the orchard of one Mr Lewis, where two ‘highly celebrated’ mosaics were said to be viewable. But Donovan was to be disappointed. ‘Passing through the orchard, we soon perceived that the first of these pavements, having lain exposed in the open ground, was nearly all demolished; part of the broad external border, and some portion of the inner quadrangle, alone remaining.’ The other was reduced to a few tesserae ‘scattered promiscuously through the grass, and nettles’. Donovan recorded the reason for the disaster: the landowner’s initial enthusiasm for the mosaic had ‘suffered a very sensible diminution’. He had dismantled the structure built to protect the mosaic from the ravages of the weather, and used the materials to make a new brewhouse.

When I visited Cosh in his well-ordered modern house in Surrey, the walls hung with some of his beautifully drafted drawings, he told me of a myriad possible deaths for a mosaic. Exposure to the elements was the most serious: Lysons, for example, had recorded the fate of a section of the Great Pavement, ‘containing the figures of an elephant and several birds’, that had been unearthed and left unprotected a decade before he visited in the 1790s. ‘The wet and frost have long since entirely destroyed it,’ he wrote. Then there is the danger of looting by souvenir-hunters, damage by livestock, soil erosion, or destruction to make way for building projects. Deep modern ploughing is another threat: in the final volume of
Roman Mosaics of Britain
is a poignant drawing of a mosaic found in 2002 in Pillerton Priors, Warwickshire, gouged by recent plough lines like giant clawmarks. Or there is simple human neglect. ‘In York there’s a pub called the Jolly Bacchus,’ Cosh told me. ‘They found a mosaic, and thought,
that’s a nice attraction for people coming to the pub – let’s charge people a penny. This was in the 1800s. That didn’t make them any money. So they used it as stables instead, and it was trampled to smithereens.’ He told me, too, about the building of the Great Western Railway, which ‘had a habit of going right through Roman villas’. A mosaic was discovered at Newton St Loe in Somerset during the building of the Bath to Bristol line in 1837. Fortunately, one of the young engineers, Thomas Marsh, was an enthusiast for Roman things. He made plans and drawings of the site, and traced the finest mosaic – another Orpheus panel, probably dating from the late fourth century. ‘Marsh had the mosaic lifted and set into Keynsham railway station,’ Cosh said. ‘Eventually, for whatever reason, the mosaic had to go. It was set in concrete – they hacked it up with a pickaxe, and gave the pieces to what became Bristol City Museum. There it was damaged in a fire in the museum stores, so it was not only broken up, but blackened, too.’ In 2000, it was pieced back together and put on display – but is now back in store. Aside from the technical difficulties of lifting mosaics, they are often too large and unwieldy to be displayed well in museums. Of one of the most famous mosaics ever to be excavated in Britain – the Hinton St Mary mosaic, from Dorset – only the central part is on show, at the British Museum. Most experts believe that the figure at its heart, a head-and-shoulders backed by a chi-rho, is meant to depict Christ. But there is no room to display the rest of the pavement, with its vigorous, lively scenes of deer-hunting, its corner panels of four men who might be the four Evangelists, and its panel showing Bellerophon slaying the Chimaera – a heterogenous composition that, seen as a whole, might complicate a straightforwardly Christian interpretation of its iconography.