Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XI.djvu/875

MOSAIC adornment for pavements. The Romans made it coextensive with their civilization, and from Britain to the Euphrates remains of ancient Koman mosaics have frequently been exhumed. Of the varieties in use among the ancients, the principal were the pavimenta sectilia, consist- ing of floors formed of pieces of stone of dif- ferent colors, cut geometrically and cemented together ; the pavimenta tessellata, or floors inlaid with small cubes of stone forming a col- ored design; the opus vermiculatum, and the opus musivum, in which colored cubes of clay or glass of every conceivable tint, set up very much as types are by compositors, were em- ployed to produce elaborate finished pictures. The first three were included under the general name lithostrotum. With the overthrow of paganism and the establishment of the Chris- tian religion commenced a new and grander era in the history of the art; and mosaics, 3m being used almost exclusively in pave- ments, were transferred to the walls and ceil- ings of sacred edifices. The connecting link between the mosaic pavements of Pompeii and the mosaics of Christian origin is so slight, that Dr. Kugler is " almost tempted to believe that historical mosaic painting of the grander style first started into life in the course of the 4th century, and suddenly took its wide spread." Tor nearly 1,000 years from this period it was almost exclusively employed for mural decoration, and from its durability has pre- served a knowledge of the arts and in some degree of the religious ideas of the middle ages. From the 7th to the 9th century the most important and interesting remains of pictorial art are the mosaics in the churches and the manuscript illuminations ; and' the most ancient representations of the Virgin Mary now remaining are the old mosaics in the churches of Rome, Pisa, and Venice, re- ferred to the latter half of the 5th century. Christian mosaics admit of two general di- visions, the later Roman and the Byzantine styles, the materials in use being in general cubes of colored glass, inlaid, in the Roman school, on a ground of blue or white, and in the Byzantine school on a gold ground, although in the latter the tesserce are frequently irregu- lar in size and the workmanship coarse. The former style flourished in Italy chiefly in the 5th and 6th centuries, the most splendid speci- mens of it being found in the churches of Rome and Ravenna. The churches of Sta. Maria Maggiore in the former city and of San Vitale in the latter contain perhaps the finest. When in the 5th century the arts and sciences were driven out of Italy by the distracted state of the country, they found refuge in Constanti- nople, where about the commencement of the 6th century arose that peculiar style pervading many branches of the fine arts, to which the general name of Byzantine has been applied, and which for five succeeding centuries had a predominant influence throughout Europe and among many eastern nations. The first and MOSASAURUS 857 greatest example of it is the celebrated church of St. Sophia, built by Justinian about the middle of the 6th century, and adorned with an almost incalculable wealth of mosaics, of which only a few colossal seraphim and the traces of a figure of the Madonna have escaped the effects of Mohammedan iconoclasm. By the middle of the 7th century it gained a foot- hold in Rome, where the native school of mo- saics had lapsed into decay ; and subsequently it came into competition with the Lombard, Norman-Byzantine, and Romanesque styles, each of which betrays the influence of the parent Byzantine. The mosaics in the church of St. Mark in Venice, executed between the llth and 14th centuries, are perhaps the purest specimens of the style in Italy. They cover a surface of about 40,000 square feet of the up- per walls, wagon roofs, and cupolas, and are laid upon a gold ground. Others, in a different style, were executed as late as the 16th century, Titian, Tintoretto, and contemporary masters, in some instances furnishing the cartoons ; and the whole is fitly described as " a gigan- tic work which even all the wealth of Venice spent six centuries in patching together." In the 12th century a new or Romanesque style, founded upon Byzantine traditions, arose in Italy; and early in the 13th century the Ital- ians in northern and central Italy, renouncing their dependence on Greek artists, began to execute mosaic work for themselves according to original conceptions of nature. Andrea Taffi, one of the earliest and most famous of the Italian mosaicisti, produced a figure of the Saviour 14 ft. high, which, Vasari says, spread his fame throughout Italy. Contemporary with and immediately succeeding him were Jacopo da Turrita, the Gaddi, Giotto, and oth- ers, of whom the last executed the celebrated namcella, now in St. Peter's in Rome. Among the latest of the mosaicisti, who worked from their own or original designs, were Baldovi- netto, Gherardo, and particularly Ghirlandaio, the master of Michel Angelo, and Muziano, who brought the art to great perfection. At the commencement of the 17th century Clem- ent VIII. employed numerous artists to deco- rate the interior of the dome of St. Peter's with mosaic copies of the works of eminent masters, and each succeeding century has added to the immense wealth in works of art of this description deposited in the church. In the 18th century Pietro Paolo Cristofori founded a school for mosaic in Rome, where the art is now practised on a grander scale than in any other part of the world. MOS1SAURFS, a gigantic fossil reptile, so named by Conybeare from its having been first found on the banks of the river Maas, near Maestricht in Holland, in the upper cretaceous formations of that district. It was referred to the orders of cetaceans and crocodilians, but A. Camper and Cuvier showed from the teeth and the skeleton that its true place was between the monitors and the iguanian lizards. The bones