Roman monochrome mosaics, c.2nd century AD

Black and white marble tesserae

Various widths between: 48-115cm

11207-11215 EL

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Further images

Nine sections of mosaic from the same floor, created from black and white marble tesserae. Two sections are from a frieze of continuous waves, the others from a band of...

Provenance

Charles Kinnaird, 8th Lord Kinnaird (1780-1826), RossiePriory, Perthshire, UK; acquired in Rome and exported to Scotland in 1826
Private collection, Chicago, USA; acquired from Sotheby’s,London, in 1987

Asher Adelman

James Mayor Gallery; acquired from the above

William Seighart; acquired from James Mayor Gallery

These sections formed part of a floor discovered in 1822 near Rome at a vineyard on Monte Rosario, about half a mile beyond the Porta Portuensis on the right bank of the Tiber. George William Russell (1790–1846) and Lord Charles Kinnaird (1780–1826) were in Rome at the time, as part of the Grand Tour, and brought the fragments back toWoburn Abbey and Rossie Priory respectively.
After their rediscovery, the fragments of the mosaic pavement were restored in Rome by Giuseppe Baseggio under the supervision of Lord Kinnaird. They were then divided between the two friends, and those bought by Lord Kinnaird were shipped to his stately family mansion, Rossie Priory, in Perthshire, Scotland. These included the nine ornamental bands in the present group, which were installed in the stables, where they remained largely out of the public eye until 1987, when the fragments were sold at auction.

Exhibitions

Mayor Gallery, London, 'Early Abstraction', 2nd February-24th March 1995. The exhibition featured the majority of the mosaics from Rossie Priory. For installation images see https://www.mayorgallery.com/exhibitions/186-early-abstraction-2nd-century-a.d.-roman-mosaics/

Literature

See a watercolour of the entire mosaic pavement, after a drawing made by M. Valadier in 1822, published in Katharine A. Raff, Roman Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 2017), fig.146–153.9

Publications

Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge, 1882), p.656, no.136
Sotheby's, London, UK, Antiquities, 13th-14th July 1987, lot 311
Katharine A. Raff, Roman Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 2017), https://publications.artic.edu/roman/reader/romanart/section/1960/end

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