Mosaic

Teaching today, at the IMA in Oakland. I arrive at Fruitvale early, and wait for Celeste outside the BART station. I can’t see the IMA truck, so I find myself examining the Bingo Bugle and Classified Flea Market dispensers. What is the Bingo Bugle do you suppose?

Gave a long illustrated lecture about principles of design. The students were smiling and nodding in agreement at the points I was making. On the edge of launching into an explanation of allegory in depictions of animals in the medieval world and their form of pictorial expression, I noticed some of my audience had fallen asleep.

Allegory is interesting though. We think of the Middle Ages as entirely separate from the classical world, but they didn’t think like that then. They had to reinterpret the past, and re-understand earlier beliefs from a new Christian perspective. Everything had its place in a cosmic order. So representations of animals – the kind you see in the mosaics at Aquileia, Ganagobie or (to my mind best of all) at Otranto, are not just illustrative, they are full of meaning. Each creature stands for an aspect of the Christian message. A peacock, for example (which had been known in the classical world as a symbol of the afterlife) is given new symbolic meaning by standing for the incorruptible flesh of Christ, and of life eternal. Images of animals were not sentimental, they were potent reminders of the moral order of the world.

Image of Otranto by Adrian Fletcher. I highly recommend you click this link. He has wonderful photographs, and recommendations about where to eat if you visit.

Photo © Adrian Fletcher, www.paradoxplace.com

Posted under: History, Learn, Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: Allegory in medieval art > Bingo Bugle > IMA > Otranto mosaics