JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

© 2006

 

The Mask of Dionysus: Optical Illusions in Ancient Roman Mosaics—And Everywhere Else

 

            Western culture may be slowly detoxing from Christianity, but the underlying addiction to dualism has proven hard to kick. Science and pop culture are still essentially great Manicheaen thesauri defining everything with sympathies and antonyms. (An apparent exception might be quantum physics and the New Age’s designer-knockoff versions thereof, though it still amounts to, “Something can have two properties simultaneously—but only two properties. And you can only measure one of them anyway, sucker!” One can only suspect we have refined trinitarianism more than replaced it.)

            There are a whole slew of people who believe in magic. There are a relative few who penetrate the trick. There are very, very few who believe the importance may be the magic trick itself, who can enjoy knowing the falsity while being unable to prove the trick, who suspect that the truth lies in that moment of suspended ambiguity.

            I am not much of a moral relativist, and by no means a supernaturalist—I have too much imagination for that. I’m talking about epistemology, not etiology (to use a Western pseudo-antonymic pair), and the apparent limits of our dominant modes of thought (some more apparent than others). I’m a strong believer that everything is true; the question is, in what way is something true—emotionally, literally, etc. Often, we don’t even know what we mean by “true.” We Americans in particular live such ideological lives, we think in such solid, dualistic symbolism, that much of the true contradiction and amorphousness and mystery of our real lives slips by us unnoticed. (Or, it’s degraded and punished if it is noticed.) As one of myriad examples, liberals and conservatives alike are pleased to talk in terms of “gay” and “straight”; virtually nobody wants to address “bisexual” and “transgender,” and certainly not outside a movie with a lot of disco in it. And even those intermediate definitions are beloved—halfway points on an imaginary, ideological ladder that pretty much leads to nowhere in anybody’s real life.

            Magicky-minded people tend to be self-deluded a lot—indeed, it’s their defining trait—as they overvalue and reify their personal fantasies. Science-minded people tend to be self-deluded a lot, too, mostly due to egomania from being surrounded by magicky-minded people and hence right all the time. (Look, I told you this dualism thing is hard to shake.) As I fall squarely into the latter camp, my brain responds to unusual situations by engaging in a figure-it-out frenzy that neatly masks how confused I am much of the time.

            Over the past few years, I’ve worked on slowing the process down and acknowledging, even savoring, my confusion. The first thing I noticed was how frequently and constantly I don’t know what’s happening. Our days are filled with mysteries—who is walking up behind me? what’s that sound in the distance? what’s that thing lying in the road? Most of these mysteries resolve themselves within seconds, are easily dismissed by a stereotyped guess, and/or are simply forgotten because they don’t matter much anyway. An example: One day, I thought I saw a bus I wanted to catch coming—but then realized it was a reflection in a window of a bus going the opposite direction. Easy mistake, easily forgotten. But it actually says a lot about the uncertainty of vision and the power of desire. Another example: After parking my car in a cemetery one day, I walked back and at about 50 feet away, saw a good-sized branch lying on the hood. It didn’t look like there was any damage, but I worried a little. I kept my eyes on it until I was within 10 feet—and realized it was actually the shadow of a branch still on a tree, perfectly cast so it appeared only on the hood, and in such rich blackness it appeared to have volume. My anxiety added the finishing touches.

            It’s only when something really bizarro happens that we gain awareness of our perpetual confusion. It’s hilarious how many “alien spaceship” witnesses are dead sure of the solidity of their observations, when judging size, speed and composition of anything in the sky is hard enough, and our perceptual miscues and incompletions are constant anyway.

            Perception isn’t like reality sticking a gas pump into our senses and filling her up. It’s a complex process, and an intellectually mediated one.

            The most striking revelations of this state for me have come when I realized I truly didn’t know what I was experiencing, and let myself quit trying. An example:

            One day, I was standing at a bus stop. (Yes, buses again; Boston’s transit system is so inept, it naturally produces time for meditations.) Looking at a tree across the street, I noticed an unnaturally rectilinear pattern among its branches—something almost certainly artificial, human-made. It looked like it might be metal. But it was hard to tell its nature or position, even whether it was a solid cube/block or just some kind of framework. My brain immediately began hypothesizing why someone would build a framework within the branches.

            Then I stopped myself, and forced myself to admit the truth: I was not in a theater; I was not watching a movie; no one could be playing some sort of trick; I was standing on a normal street looking at a normal tree with something presumably normal within it—yet I honestly had no idea what I was looking at. I could not trust reality to be straightforward.

            Then I let myself get back to work, and after moving around a bit, I saw it was a square-topped streetlamp which I happened to be viewing from an odd angle, and which had a pole unusually well-hidden by foliage, another pole and my point of view.

            Our culture is good at talking about that sense of curiosity and mystery. It’s also good at talking about that kind of investigating and solution-finding. What it sucks at is describing that transformative moment of ambiguity.

            Science, religion, pop culture, whatever—none of them really offer a way to symbolize ambiguity. One class of objects does come close—optical illusions. Of course, in our dualistic world, illusions are discussed in terms of their solutions, and often with a kind of moral judgment attached; my “Oxford English Dictionary” defines them in terms of deception and “misapprehension.” They become symbols of falsehood, rather than of ambiguity.1 Still, let’s keep them in mind.

            The interesting thing is that Western culture used to excel at symbolizing ambiguity, through the multiple avatars of the pagan gods.

            This may sound funny; modern understanding of Greco-Roman deities is that there was, essentially, a god for everything—that is, an individual god for each object or emotion, a comprehension largely picked up from the bastardization of pagan deism evident in the system of Catholic saints.

            There’s a modicum of truth to this; the deities were strongly etiological. But in fact, the major Greek gods were spectacularly ambiguous, multiple-personality-disorder, contradiction-embracing marvels. (One could say the same about the Judeo-Christian-Muslim god[s] as well, but the focus in all those religions is on synthesis and uniformity; God’s identity comes despite, not because of, his contradictions and multiplicities.)

             Pagan deities like Athena and Apollo had the richly overburdened portfolios of overworked teachers in a one-room schoolhouse. Perhaps the greatest example is Dionysus, the shape-shifting, maddeningly vague god of viticulture, drunken madness, animal nature, art/theater and civilization itself. His worship was even less concrete; he was often viewed as an innately foreign, Eastern god (and sometimes controversial because of it), and was celebrated under drastically different aspects from city to city, region to region.

            It was, then, striking to learn of an ancient optical illusion involving an apparent figure of Dionysus—the ambiguous god turned ambiguous symbol.

            And it was edifying—and appropriate—that my pursuit of the meaning and nature of this image ultimately evaporated in a cloud of ambiguity. It became an outstanding lesson in how uncertain the certainties of journalism and scholarship (my own included) really are—and how that is something as fruitful at least as much as it is deceptive or malign. I write sober, but perhaps Dionysus still provides the occasional jolt of inspiration to those who appreciate the imprecise.

            “Newly found mosaic is an optical illusion,” was the headline on a June 3 article in the “The Guardian” (Manchester, UK) filed from Rome.

            Reporter John Hooper explained: “Archaeologists studying an ancient mosaic found by workers laying cable south of Rome have been astonished to discover that it is an optical illusion.

            “Viewed one way up it is a bald old man with a beard, but turned the other way round it is a beardless youth.

            “Roberto Cereghino, a government archaeological official…said it appeared to be a depiction of Bacchus [the Roman, more wine-centric version of Dionysus].

            “The double face is surrounded by objects that that were used in Bacchanalian rites: an ancient musical instrument, the sistrum, a two-handed drinking bowl, and a priestly wand. The mosaic’s optical trickery may be linked to the fact that Bacchus was the god of wine….” The article did not include a photograph.

            I suppose my initial interest here was how it incarnated my old aesthetic rule (founded in movie-watching) that Old Things Are Always Cooler Than You Think. Indeed, it turns out that ancient Greek and Roman mosaics are loaded with fascinating optical illusions. In fact, optical trickery and ambiguity are fundamental to the medium.

            That also gave me my first taste of factual illusion; Hooper had flatly declared that optical illusion mosaics are rare and virtually unknown in Italy. That’s simply very wrong; but it also reflects an ambiguity, an indication that Hooper didn’t realize his information was about the Dionysian face specifically, which, as we will see, is a special case indeed.

            One of the curious things in researching optical illusions is deciding what qualifies as one—yet another exercise in ambiguity. After all, as pointed out by Al Seckel, the foremost modern connoisseur of optical illusions, “traditional Western art is illusionistic by nature.”2 The Greeks and Romans were obsessed with realism, naturalism, modeling and attempts at perspective. But that’s a little different than true optical illusions or trompe l’oeil—works that are intended not to be merely convincing art, but truly to fool the viewer into perceiving the artificial as real or to perceive something that isn’t there at all. However, the Greeks and Romans did both in profusion. The affinity between the realistic and the illusionistic is natural and a matter of degrees, intent and technique.

            Mosaic is the art of decorating a surface—particularly a floor—with tesserae, tiny (sometimes under 1 square millimeter), often colored, purposefully cut bits of stone, glass or the like. It is a sophistication of earlier techniques using found pebbles or stone chips, and of opus sectile, a method using larger cut stones to create less detailed patterns.3 (Opus sectile remains popular, including on the floor of the elevator I used to exit the Boston Public Library after reading about it.)

            While unique in technique, the medium was frequently imitative in content, whether it was copying great (now lost) paintings, rugs (or other textiles), opus sectile or architectural elements. Indeed, the motivation for creating tesserae was likely to achieve the fineness of detail that allowed for the copying of paintings or painterly effects. There’s something inherently illusionistic in this plagiaristic intent behind early mosaics.

            But many mosaics were literally illusionistic. One of the earliest mosaic optical illusions, borrowed from opus sectile (an op. sectile illusion?) involved a pattern of variously colored parallelograms to create the illusion of a field of cubes, which appear variously to project from or recede into the surface like a Gestalt psychology demonstration of multistability.4 The pattern will be familiar to anyone who played the old video game “Q*Bert,” which itself is built on the modern mosaic imagery of pixilation.5 (The field of cubes is also known in wall paintings, though in this case it apparently was imitated from opus sectile.)

            Many mosaics had a representational, but clearly two-dimensional, central image, but also a 3-D perspective border borrowed from architecture (and from similarly imitative illusionistic borders in paintings). Common forms were the “perspective meander,” composed of wandering, intersecting lines, and “dentils,” an apparently projecting row of rectangular prisms, like a row of dominos. Two-dimensional meanders were also popular; the perspective version just added the appearance of depth and shading. Meander was also sometimes used as a main surface pattern, not just a border. (Perspective meander borders are found on some of the earliest known tessellated mosaics, such as those in Morgantina, Sicily, dating to c. 260-210 B.C., so they were imitated from paintings from the start.)

            A weirder and more strikingly modern pattern was the “shield of triangles,” a circular, quasi-spiraling arrangement of black-and-white triangles that gives vague suggestions of motion and depth or projection. It looks like some Op Art creation.

            Sometimes artists went all-out and created incredible mosaics that were entirely trompe l’oeil. One of those artists was so virtuosic at illusions, he is now the only ancient mosaicist mentioned by name in surviving classical literature. That’s Sosos (sometimes given as “Sosus”), named in Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History.” He of the palindromic name was apparently also pretty tricky with the tesserae.

            Perhaps his most stunning work for our purposes was his asarotos oikos, or “unswept room,” motif—a playful attempt at trompe l’oeil. Created in Pergamon likely around 130 B.C., this mosaic, in Pliny’s words, “represented the debris of a meal, and those things which are normally swept away, as if they had been left there….”6 Sosos’ original is lost, but several Roman copies or derivations survive; the best is considered the one preserved in the Vatican museums, signed by one Heraklitos. It’s not exactly convincing, but still striking. It shows a pseudo-random assortment of debris casting shadows on a white ground, with the lack of background making the objects appear almost as if floating in space. Amongst the items are a bird claw, a bone, shells, a garlic clove, nuts and even a mouse come to nibble on the trash. (A favorite place for mosaics was dining room floors; hence this depiction of food debris.)

            Another example of playful trompe l’oeil, also from Pergamon, is a mosaic signed by one Hephaistion. He put his signature on the image of a piece of parchment “attached” to the mosaic with blobs of wax; one bit of wax is depicted as having broken, with the parchment corner curling up. It’s a charming little effect, and fairly convincing.

            Pliny also refers to another reportedly stunning work depicting doves perching on a golden bowl of water. His wording is vague, but it appears also to be a work by Sosos, and may have been the main design surrounded by the “unswept floor.” A fine version of this mosaic—perhaps the relocated original—exists today, found in the emperor Hadrian’s villa. It isn’t trompe l’oeil, but is a fine work easily mistaken for a painting even on repeated looks.7 That’s a sort of double illusion in many mosaics; they are meant to fool the eye in and of themselves, while also imitating paintings that do the same. It’s a relentlessly self-conscious, self-reflective medium in that way.

            Until the moment Western art turned into the Christian propaganda stick figures of the medieval era, Roman mosaics continued to pursue this optical illusion obsession. One motif that developed was creating the illusion of a coffered ceiling, sometimes to mirror an actual one above, often just to show off. The coffers were depicted with architectural detail and depth, with central paintings and so forth. Architectural detail in general became popular, with figures depicted inside elaborately three-dimensional prosceniums and the like.

            This Greco-Roman urge to make optical illusions was curious enough in itself. Doing it on a floor strikes me as especially strange. As Katherine M.D. Dunbabin, an authority on ancient mosaics, puts it, “Such effects are incompatible with the concept of the floor as a flat surface to be decorated...,” and those with 2-D images and 3-D borders show “the ambiguity of [the Hellenistic] attitude to the decoration of the floor, where effects of relief are deliberately contrasted with flat surface decor.”8 Or, going back to dualism for a moment, as mosaic expert Roger Ling more judgmentally puts it, such art creates “the problematic effects of ‘opening’ the floor with illusionistic pictures which…contradict[s] the architectonic function of the floor surface….”9

            That term “ambiguity” again. Even a floor, the ultimate metaphor for the flat, stable and boring, wasn’t really a floor to the Greeks and Romans. Such images were dependent, contingent, open to play.

            The Romans also decorated walls and ceilings with mosaics, though that form came later and, naturally, has significantly fewer surviving examples. Interestingly, the idea came from another bizarro Roman illusion (and allusion)—artificial grottoes.

            In Republican Rome, there was an obsession with natural caves, which were viewed as relatively holy places populated by nymphs—or even by the Muses, which appears to be where the corrupted term “mosaic” originates.

            As not every rich weirdo had a cave handy, there was a trend of building fake caves inside one’s villa or on one’s property, lining its walls with stones, shells and the like for realism. Extreme examples had fake stalactites, flowing water and similar amenities. Naturally, artists began using tessellated mosaics to line the walls instead, and wall and ceiling/vault mosaics were born. (Incidentally, this highlights one fact that is not ambiguous at all: all those depictions of ancient Roman buildings as bone-white marble are totally wrong. The empire was a riot of painted, mosaic and otherwise colorful decorations, and anything blank would’ve been splattered with graffiti, just like it is today.)

            I’ve referred to mosaics imitating wall paintings; it’s important to note that these paintings themselves often used attempted trompe l’oeil and illusionistic elements. These paintings were something like murals, though they would often be on interior walls of houses, or the walls of internal courtyards.

            The best surviving Roman wall paintings are those from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Many of them share a basic idea of pretending there are holes or windows through which the viewer sees columns, arches and rows of buildings. The presentation can be almost abstract—columns and arches sprawl all over, disconnected from any rational architecture—and the perspective is often multiple or otherwise imprecise, but the general illusion is effective. Less dramatically, such paintings can show perspective-border elements similar to mosaics; for example, a famous painting apparently depicting an enigmatic religious ritual from the so-called Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii includes a perspective meander border, much like an actual, unpainted wall likely would.

            Mosaics were largely a private artform, appearing in homes and villas, and customized to suit the owners. While they used many illusionistic elements, many of them depicted familiar mythological characters in a normal way. But even these images can be ambiguous; they did not have the one-note symbolic resonance of over-the-couch art or pop-culture knickknacks. As Dunbabin says, “Roman art in the private sphere is regularly marked by multivalence or polysemy. Its meaning came from context, and accordingly any given theme could be read in different ways.”

            One could say the same for the Greco-Roman deities. And one of those deities, incidentally, shows up frequently in household mosaics. Yep, it’s Dionysus, presumably because of all the drinking one would do in the dining room with friends and family.

            So we’ve got Dionysus in mosaics. We’ve got stunning optical illusions in mosaics. But where’s our Dionysian double face?

            That’s what I wondered as I pushed aside the big fat books on ancient mosaics, having seen nothing even slightly similar to the illusion described in the Guardian article. A double-face illusion certainly seemed to fit the pattern, but there weren’t any to be found.

            After consulting Dunbabin and other mosaic experts, I learned there are three known examples of this Dionysian double face. The one mentioned in the Guardian article—which did not give a precise location—is in Pomezia, Italy. Another, in Ascoli Piceno, Italy, has been known for about 50 years. A third was recently found in Ecija, Spain, but photos have not yet been published.10 They’re all Roman.

            With this information in hand, I was finally able to acquire photos of the two Italian examples.11 And so the obvious was able to hit me: the double faces are not optical illusions.

            They’re certainly visual tricks, but they do not appear to be something they are not. They are not illusionary. What they depict (the Ascoli Piceno version much more artistically and the Pomezia version much less so) are conjoined heads that share eyes, with each other’s mouth on the other’s forehead. The chin of one becomes the bald head of the other; the beard of one becomes the hair of another. The images are pretty much just visual messes that are fun to see from one direction and then the other; at best, one could say the eyes are illusionary, as they cleverly appear to have one expression from one point of view and a different one when inverted. As Dunbabin said to me, “You are right that they are not true optical illusions: rather a way of playing with the notion of one form changing into another.”

            Hooper may not have actually seen the image he was writing about when he called it an optical illusion.12 But Dr. Mark Merrony, writing an article accompanying a photo of the mosaic in the scholarly magazine “Minerva,” must have; he nonetheless called it a “unique optical illusion,” when in fact it is neither.13

            In this way, the reports about the mosaic were themselves illusions, as journalism always is a kind of trompe l’oeil, an attempt at naturalistic representation that can never fully succeed. By this I don’t simply mean that they were untrue, though they were, as far as it goes. They embraced, under the guise of journalistic certainty, a wealth of ambiguous, unexplored bits of information. It’s no coincidence that, in fact, there is an entire realm of optical illusion mosaics. This mosaic is not an optical illusion, but it fits into an aesthetic and a medium that featured and relied on optical illusions. The confusion is natural, not a pure accident. The journalists made mistakes, but fruitful ones—at least for those willing to do their own research.

            So these mosaics are not optical illusions. What, then, is their purpose, intent and origin?

            Dunbabin was able to provide some context. She notes that while Dionysus/Bacchus indeed was known to morph into an old man or a young man as suited him, the mosaic images likely do not depict him directly, but rather a young satyr (a woodland spirit following the god) and Silenus (the oldest and closest follower of the god). But it nonetheless likely alludes to Dionysus/Bacchus himself. “The association is with Dionysus the shape-changer, the god with a thousand forms, rather than simply with his role as a god of wine,” Dunbabin said.

            So not an optical illusion, but, like them—perhaps even better than them—a symbol of ambiguity, of multivalence and multistability. In that sense, it’s reflective of all Greco-Roman art—which was the invention of Dionysus, after all. (It’s also interesting that they exploit two different points of view, whereas some optical illusion mosaics work from only one point of view in the room, as Ling and others frequently note.)

            But the lineage of such a symbol is amazingly difficult to find. Before I saw photographs of the mosaics, I thought they might be something like the “old woman/young woman” image familiar from psychology textbooks, which appears to be a young woman looking away, then can switch perspective to appear to be the profile of an old woman.14

            In fact, they’re much more like popular cartoons generally known as “topsy-turvys,” after the title of children’s books featuring such images created in the late 1800s by Peter Newell. Some of these much more recent images by Newell and others are closer to true optical illusions (or in fact are the real deal), not betraying their nature until they’re inverted.

            Such images are almost always humorous (or intended as such). It’s important to note that many of the Greco-Roman optical illusions and visual tricks may have been jokes, too. Prof. John R. Clarke of the University of Texas at Austin’s art history department notes many examples of  ancient trompe l’oeil as “double-take humor”; the “unswept floor” was probably marvelously amusing to visitors.15

            But as for topsy-turvys, their origin is woefully untraceable. Seckel, who apparently is unaware of the obscure Roman mosaics, says the origin of such images is unknown. His first known examples are Reformation-era coins showing the pope, who turned into the devil when you inverted the image. Such visual tricks and illusions were often used to encode religious and political messages in those days. Some quasi-illusionary topsy-turvy paintings were made in the same era by the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who made bizarre illusionistic portraits of people composed of vegetables, sea creatures, books and the like. One of his topsy-turvys (“Vegetable Gardener,” 1590) shows a bowl of vegetables that, when inverted, appears to be a crude representation of a face.16

            That gets us nowhere close to ancient Rome. We know that mosaics were virtually always imitative and derivative, so it would be fair to guess that the double faces started in some other medium. Painting was obviously a popular source, but I could find nothing identical there. One similarity did strike me, however. The youthful face of the Ascoli Piceno double face is scowling severely, bug-eyed and open-mouthed. It reminds me quite a bit of a similarly scowling face that appears on the lintel of a trompe l’oeil wall painting from the Villa Boscoreale near Pompeii (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art).17 Mask-like and Medusa-esque, this painted face presumably had some sort of anti-evil-spirit function.

            I say that because such wards and charms were common in Roman household art. Indeed, there are also mosaics devoted to such magic. One from Antioch shows the dreaded evil eye speared by a trident and a sword; under attack by a bird, a lobster, a dog, a snake, a cat and a centipede; and threatened by the super-sized erection of a dwarf, a class of persons considered magical in the era.

            I’m not saying the double faces are anti-evil charms per se. Whatever the nature of the painted face, it likely is itself an imitation of an actual, fairly common architectural feature. The double faces could be a kind of play on that feature, derived from both painting and architecture, like many other mosaic illusion motifs.

            Optical illusions as a kind of Transformers: More Than Meets the Evil Eye occurred to academics as well, but in a different medium: intaglio, or engraved, gems.

            “Combinations of heads, sometimes of different ages, are common on Roman sealstones, and indeed earlier right back to the Greek archaic period c. 500 B.C.,” I was told by Dr. Martin Henig of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, one of the foremost experts in classical gems (known elegantly as glyptics). “The basic desire seems to have been to create something strange which might deflect the evil eye, but the imagery is often Dionysiac, and the heads can be seen as elderly silenoi (bearded male), youthful satyrs (non-bearded male) [and] maenads [Dionysus’ raving female followers] (female)….So the device could evoke the saving power of Bacchus, and of course Bacchus is very common on Roman mosaic pavements, often from dining rooms, where wine was drunk, so we need not be surprised to see such a device on a dining room floor.”

            This intaglio gem design connection was also suggested to me by Ling, a professor of art history at the University of Manchester, and by the “Minerva” magazine article. Clarke notes that evil eye avoidance can involve humor—visual jokes—as well as more serious charms, which is interesting to keep in mind about our double faces, too. (Anything that distracted the evil eye was good, whether it worked by shock or by humor.)

            The intaglio comparison is an appealing, perceptive and in some ways persuasive observation. But here’s the key problem—no ancient gem, as far as I can tell, depicts any type of topsy-turvy image. What Henig meant by “combinations of heads” is something common but quite different—janiform heads; i.e., heads with two separate faces, one facing front and one facing back (and sometimes a third on the top of the head for good measure). They’re not essentially illusionistic, nor even optical tricks. (I did find two stray examples of two faces conjoined at the top of their heads, but they didn’t share eyes, etc.)  However, many of them are indeed Dionysiac.18

            Intaglio gems are tiny things with engraved images, essentially intended to be pressed into wax or clay to create a relief image as a kind of signature or official seal. The images were often fantastical, sometimes pornographic, occasionally self-consciously clever, as with those depicting a sandal- or footprint. The artistry could be quite high.19

            Intaglio gems are a pretty ambiguous medium themselves. The carvings are tiny, deeply incised and reversed, really only revealing and completing themselves in the impression they leave in the wax or museum-quality plaster or whatever. Though some gems were carved with non-reversed images, to be appreciated in their own right, they’re very hard to study just by looking at them. Ironically, photographs of the carvings can be useful because, on the flat photo surface, the engraving can appear to be a relief due to an optical illusion. The glyptic expert John Boardman called it a “satisfactory illusion…but it is still an illusion.”20 I noticed this illusion myself just looking at gems at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Everything about intaglio gems involves interplay, and sometimes confusion, between foreground and background, engraving and relief. They inherently imply and inspire ideas of image reversals. Such ambiguity and shifting may or may not be relevant to our discussion, but it’s certainly aesthetically appropriate. An intaglio gem is a dynamic kind of artwork.

            Those combination heads Henig referred to are known as grotesques or grylli (sometimes grylloi), from the Latin and Italian for “cricket” or “grasshopper,” and by extension, a fancy or whim. They reportedly sometimes also appeared on Greek coins.21

            Many examples indeed fit the rough parameters we’re looking for. You can find many janiform faces, one bearded, one not, sometimes with a satyr face on the top of the head. Janiform satyr/maenad pairings are also pretty common.

            Crazy combos with people and animals are common as well, in some ways echoing ancient “calendar beast” designs (combinatory, chimeraeoid monsters composed of beasts representing different seasons).22 One example uses some visual trickery: it depicts a janiform male and female head with a lion face on the top; the lion’s mane acts as the hair for the other faces, and a bird sitting in the foreground also can be viewed as the male face’s beard.

            Again, however, there is no topsy-turvy grylli out there, as far as my evil eye can see. It’s a fair enough guess that this combinatory, Dionysian imagery in one obscure medium could be refined into a topsy-turvy in another. (Some artists in other media worked in intaglio as well, and intaglios are known to have copied motifs from painting and sculpture.) But it is only a guess, a groping around in aesthetic ambiguity. It doesn’t help that there are only three such mosaics extant; indeed, it is odd, considering the motif is so geographically widespread, with examples from both coasts of Italy and far-flung Spain, that it must have been quite popular.

            There’s yet another self-imposed illusion that hasn’t helped such matters. Mosaics have been there for all to see for centuries, but academics considered them an unimportant, derivative medium until the 1960s. (Meanwhile, mosaic imagery was becoming the core of our modern visual illusions in the form of TV, computing, satellite photography and astronomy, among others.) Who knows what got overlooked or lost in the interim.

            Well, these double faces are an enigma and maybe always will be, as impenetrable as the rites of a Dionysian mystery cult. But I’ll tell you, as I sit here and look at those mosaics, I see perhaps the most dead-on symbol of the human condition ever crafted.

            I’m reminded that optical illusions (or visual tricks) don’t just create a false reality; they embody ambiguity and contradiction, as we all do. They are all Dionysian—and these images literally so.

            The mask of Dionysus may just reveal all.

 

Bonus Mosaic Lore

 

            1 We are used to optical illusions with didactic “solutions” as presented in psychology texts. But not all of them are explained. Indeed, I had the curious experience of perceiving something apparently no one else has in one unexplained illusion, the “Motion Induced Blindness” phenomenon viewable at the outstanding illusion site of Dr. Michael Bach, an ophthalmologist at the University of Freiburg (www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html). In this illusion, yellow dots seemingly disappear during the viewing, though in fact they are still there. For me, the dots appear to turn green just before disappearing, something Bach told me has never been reported before. Illusions always tell us about the nature of reality, but sometimes their mystery speaks more strongly.

            2 In “Masters of Deception: Escher, Dalí & The Artists of Optical Illusion.”

            3 Virtually all of my information on mosaic history and technique came from Katherine M.D. Dunbabin’s authoritative “Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World,” which was either the mortar in which my own mosaic column is laid, or the provider of tesserae for the mosaic of my column—once again, the metaphors become ambiguous.

            4 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology for a different, modern example.

            5 On his Web site (http://members.aol.com/JPMLee/qbert.htm), “Q*Bert” creator Jeff Lee explains how he got the idea for the faux cube pattern from the works of the famed optical illusion artist M.C. Escher.

            6 As quoted in Dunbabin, op. cit.

            7 As described in the 1855 John Bostock and H.T. Riley translation of “Natural History,” via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library at www.perseus.tufts.edu.

            8 Dunbabin, op. cit.

            9 In “Ancient Mosaics.”

            10 According to Dunbabin, via e-mail. Update: I have since seen images (in an unfortunately over-darkened fax) of the Ecija mosaic as published in “Las Casas de los extranjeros in la colonia Augusta Firma Astigi” by Guadalupe Lopez Monteagudo, “L’Africa Romana” 16, 2006, pp. 107-132, kindly provided to me by Prof. Demetrios Michaelides, director of the Archaeological Research Unit at the University of Cyprus. While I can’t accurately judge the quality of the mosaic, its figures wield a pedum, or shepherd’s crook, and a small drum. Lopez Monteagudo describes them as Bacchic, and explains that they depict the usual old man/young man interplay. Among the themes she associates with the image are “renovation, revitalization and the passing of time” and the Dionysian connection with the theater, where “all is illusion.” (My translations from Spanish.) Particularly, she sees this mosaic’s imagery as Dionysian in his agrarian aspect of Liber Pater. It’s interesting to note that the Dionysian images vary widely in aspect while retaining this core theme of amorphousness throughout the three mosaics. This may speak to local adaptations of an image in a standard mosaic pattern book that Dunbabin describes as frequently referred to by mosaic artisans.

            11 The Pomezia image was published in the September/October 2006 edition of “Minerva” magazine (http://minervamagazine.com/issue1705.news.html#pomezia). An image of the Ascoli Piceno mosaic in the 1971 publication “La Mosaïque Gréco-Romaine II” by the Colloque International Pour L’Étude de la Mosaïque Antique was kindly provided to me by Prof. Michaelides.

            12 “The Guardian” forwarded my contact information to Hooper in Italy, but he did not respond to my request for more information about the mosaic.

            13 “Minerva,” op. cit.

            14 As illustrated and described in “Psychology: Science, Behavior and Life” by Robert L. Crooks and Jean Stein. That image is often used to illustrate “perceptual set,” the idea that one’s perception of the image can be altered by prior expectation about its content. It’s known as the “Boring Figure” (more officially, “You See My Wife, And Mother-in-Law”) after psychologist Edwund Boring, who in 1941 ripped it off from popular postcard images (created by some brilliant, anonymous pop artist) where it was known as early as the 1880s, as recounted by Seckel, op. cit. Incidentally, Seckel’s book features the artist Shigeo Fukuda, who, I learned, has done what I fantasized about in college but never did: created sculpture that looks amorphous but casts a coherent, representational, symbolic shadow.

            15 From the forthcoming book “Looking at Laughter.” Draft chapter generously supplied by the author.

            16 Seckel, op. cit.

            17 As pictured in “Gardner’s Art Through the Ages” (8th edition) by Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey.

            18 Based predominantly on John Boardman’s “Greek Gems and Finger Rings: Early Bronze Age to Late Classical” and “Archaic Greek Gems: Schools and Artists in the Sixth and Early Fifth Centuries BC,” and a review of the public collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

            19 One oddity of reviewing Greco-Roman art was noticing how realistically those ancients depicted virtually every animal—except dolphins, which were always cartoonish, eel-like things with lettuce leaves for fins. And dolphins were well-known, with prominent mythological roles. I wonder why that is?

            20 “Greek Gems and Finger Rings,” op. cit.

            21 Ibid.

            22 “The Romance of Seals and Engraved Gems” by Beth Benton Sutherland.

            23 All bonus lore is from Dunbabin, op. cit.

 

Significant sources not cited in the text or footnotes include: “Amazing Art” Web site at http://members.lycos.nl/AmazingArt/E/6.html; http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/crackerjack/UpDown.html (topsy-turvys on the site of Jill Britton of Camosun College); “The Columbia Encyclopedia” (5th edition); “The Oxford English Dictionary”; and Pompeiian wall paintings and Roman mosaics, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, personal visit. Thanks to Prof. Rolf Winkes at Brown University for suggesting key sources. Many thanks to Prof. Michaelides for extraordinary assistance. Hyperlinks have been removed from this column due to severe code-corruption problems caused by one of the links. Posted Oct. 22, 2006. Updated March 21 and 22, 2007.

 

 

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