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anthonymajanlahti.bsky.social
#MosaicMonday takes us under the basilica where #PopeFrancis chose to be buried, #SantaMariaMaggiore, a #palaeochristian basilica built atop at least two #domus in #Rome, on a peak of the #Esquiline. #AncientBluesky 🏺
MOSAIC PAVEMENT, 54-68 CE. DOMUS OF S. MARIA MAGGIORE The C5-C6 basilica of S. Maria Maggiore is built atop a large ancient domus that was built in the C1 CE near the top of the Cispian peak of the Esquiline hill. This house had a long life, surviving probably until Alaric's sack of Rome in 410, and undergoing modifications over the centuries before the huge Marian basilica crushed its ruins like a Monty Python cartoon foot. The fragments of black and white mosaic we see here have a Neronian date, and may have belonged to a tablinum opening onto a peristyle. Here we see vegetal elements with vases and birds. This was a comfortable and wealthy house with an interior garden, and higher up on the hill, partially built atop this domus, was another one whose traces can barely be perceived under the basilica of 434.
April 28, 2025 at 7:01 PM
anthonymajanlahti.bsky.social
#FrescoFriday takes us back under #SantaMariaMaggiore on the #Cispian peak of the #Esquiline in #Rome, into the #domus of the Painted Calendar, where this unusual and striking #geometric #fresco once decorated the exterior of a room built in the middle of a preexisting courtyard.
GEOMETRIC FRESCO, C. 200 CE. DOMUS UNDER S. MARIA MAGGIORE During the Severan period, the large courtyard of the domus of the Painted Calendar under S. Maria Maggiore was divided and an independent room was built in it. Its interior walls were decorated with marble panels, as is evident from the holes and metal pegs that remain, but the exterior was painted with geometric designs in red, yellow, and white, with a sort of op art effect of square piers as seen from above, each square diagonally attached to the background with false perspective. This is a pattern that we find in floor mosaics, especially in borders and frames, but never in fresco and never at the turn of the C3. The corner of the room interrupts this pattern, and around the corner the wall is frescoed in squares that form diamond designs.
January 3, 2025 at 4:02 PM
anthonymajanlahti.bsky.social
Just minutes before the New Year in #Rome, #EpigraphyTuesday reminds me of the #calendar of the #domus under #SantaMariaMaggiore. The inexorable passage of time! Love and joy for 2025.
PAINTED CALENDAR, C. 180-200 CE. DOMUS UNDER S. MARIA MAGGIORE Excavations under the presbytery end of the C5 basilica of S. Maria Maggiore in 1966 revealed an ancient domus of a long existence dating back to at least the C1 CE. It might have belonged to the gens Nerati, an aristocratic family active from the C1 to the C4. Located just below the top of the Cispian peak of the Esquiline, it fell victim to the necessity of making a terrace on which to build the church. This domus retains traces of a painted calendar, on a stratum of fresco that was later covered by other painting. Not much of this calendar survives but it was composed of painted landscapes for each month, with the days painted in white on a red background in rustic capitals. This is the calendar for September, and we can see the days before the Ides at the top, then a gap, and then the days before the Kalends of the next month beneath.
December 31, 2024 at 10:57 PM