New Getty Villa Exhibit Highlights Roman Mosaics

By ERIKA MARTIN | Reporter

The newest exhibition at the Getty Villa, “Roman Mosaics Across the Empire,” seeks to transport visitors to an ancient world of glittering public baths and luxury villas.

The installation, which opened March 30, runs until Sept. 12. It includes 12 pieces spanning three of the museum’s rooms, each representing one of the regions from which the works originate: Syria, Italy and Gaul, or modern France.

Mosaics were an important form of art in the Roman world, considered standard features not just in private villas but public monuments, baths, temples and theaters as well.

Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, said though the works on show represent just over half of the museum’s collection of 21, pieces were selected to form the richest representation of their function in Roman society.

“It’s around half in numerical terms, but the biggest and most important ones are in this exhibition,” Potts said at an opening reception for the exhibit on March 29. “What you’re seeing in square footage is certainly most of what we have.”

This is also the first time the museum has put this many of its mosaics on display. Due to the works’ size and weight it’s impossible to install them permanently, Potts said, “but this is their moment.”

The largest work, “Bear Hunt,” which depicts bears being captured for the arena, measures about 22 by 28 feet and weighs 16,000 pounds in total. It takes some imagination to envision the immense works as they were originally displayed, canvased across the floors of expansive halls.

Senior Curator of Antiquities Jeffrey Spier said much was left unknown about the piece, originally excavated in 1906, until research was undertaken leading up to this exhibit.

“We didn’t know its history,” Spier said of “Bear Hunt.” “Only recent scholarship revealed its source, which is a villa that still isn’t excavated properly near Naples.”

The Getty Conservation Institute is still engaged in the preservation of mosaics at Bulla Regia, an archeological site in northwestern Tunisia. Its goal is to train a new generation of specialists and develop new methods for in situ preservation of artifacts.

A few of the mosaics are from a town in France called Villelaure. Serendipitously, during preparations for the exhibit, officials from Villelaure reached out to the museum staff to inform them of their own project to restore the villa there. An envoy of people from the French town, including its mayor, made the pilgrimage to the show’s opening night on March 29.

J. Paul Getty himself was very interested in the art form, and most of the museum’s collection was acquired in the 1970s when he was still involved with its mission. Mosaics are especially important as they provide important clues about other lost art forms from the era, Potts said.

“They reflect the wall painting, which is a major art that has hardly survived at all from the Greek periods,” he said. “So the mosaics sometimes remain as evidence of what ancient painting on walls was like, which was a very high and sophisticated art form.”

But it’s also one of the mediums that translates most fully into later societies, most notably the Christian or Byzantine period, and a craft that is still revered today.

“We’ve all seen swimming pools in LA, which are still lined with images created in mosaic,” Potts noted.

The exhibition was curated by Alexis Belis, assistant curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum.