greek-museums:Archaeological Museum of Patra:Mosaic floor with scene of a dance by the Three GracesF
greek-museums:Archaeological Museum of Patra:Mosaic floor with scene of a dance by the Three GracesFrom a Roman villa of Patras. An inlaid floor with marble and mosaic was found in another room.The Three Graces dancing around an open altar with offerings are depicted in the centre of the scene, which is surrounded by two borders of geometrical patterns overlapping circles and a chain of diamond shapes.Only a part of the villa has been excacated and a section of the mosaic floor remains under a modern building.*it dates from the 2nd-3rd cent. A.D.*Patra is a densely populated city, and everything that you see here from buildings, like the mosaics and the bath, were discovered during public works, or when a new building was to be erected, and digging for the foundation of it, they discovered something important. So what is very interesting, is how densely Patra was populated in the past as well for so many wealthy residences to be sprawled across the modern city, and the fact that since a lot of the current buildings can’t be torn down, so many things still remain hidden today. Also what is really amazing about this one, and I personally have never encountered before in mosaics, is the attempt to render the shadow of the dancers at the bottom of their feet. To my knowledge this type of realism is almost never attempted. And since another thing that caught my eye was the wonderful shading of the highlights on the dancers’ skin, and the vividness of the fabrics, this must be an artist that paid a lot of mind in the photorealism of two-dimensional representations.A detail to really cement that this artist observed the natural world, is also the subtle difference in skin tone of the three dancers. This motif of the Graces dancing around an altar, is also to be found in other mosaics from greek space. There’s a similar one at the Archaeological Museum of Kissamos, in Crete, where the formation of the women, the gesture and the angle is quite similar if not identical.I am always under the impression that when a scene is recurrent in mosaics, then it has been borrowed, or intentionally copied by famous works of painting from the same period.Toss a coin to your blogger, oh valley of plenty?https://ko-fi.com/isabiaWhy? Because I wouldn’t kill Renfri in episode one, and then get stuck with meaningless scenes of Ciri wandering about in the moors. I am a better writer, for one. And being on the subject, if I entered a guy’s home and there were nubile naked women running around THAT HE imagined into being, I would turn around and leave immediately. It would be like entering a horny blog (you know what I am talking about) and the guy there asking me to murder a girl for him. I would be like I know exactly who to murder and it’s not the random girl you are suggesting. -- source link
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