Fig. 13.1 Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, “Bikini girls” mosaic. (B. Pace, I Mosaici di Piazza Armerina, Pl. 15)
Both the mosaics and the villa’s ambitious plan make it a sight worth seeing. There are forty-two polychrome pavements, involving the setting by the ancient workmen of 30,000,000 individual mosaic rectangles, or tesserae, over an area of more than 3500 square yards, a complex unique in extent in the Roman world. The plan, too, is one of the most ambitious known to archaeology, rivalling that of Nero’s Golden House, Hadrian’s villa, or Diocletian’s palace at Spalato on the Dalmatian cost. The villa lies three-and-a-half miles southwest of Piazza Armerina, nearly 2,000 feet above sea level, on the west slope of Monte Mangone, in the midst of green orchards and pleasant groves of nut trees. Its altitude assured its being cool in summer; its setting under the lee of the hill protected it from winter winds. But the slope required terracing, and so the villa was laid out on four levels centering on three peristyles and a portico (plan 2,15,41,26). The parts are connected by irregular rooms (13,14,40). The technique of the masonry shows that the whole complex is of one build, characterized by asymmetrical symmetry, strange, twisted ground-plans, a fondness for curves, and off-center axes, all of which shows a definite break with conventional classicism. The structure is light and elastic: the dome over the three-lobed state dining room (46), nowadays replaced by an unnecessarily ugly modern roof to protect the mosaics, was built of pumice concrete, lightened still further by setting in it lengths of clay pipe and amphorae, to reduce the weight of the superstructure on the bearing walls.
Fig. 13.2 Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, Gismondi’s reconstruction. (Pace, Mosaici, p. 33)
From a strange polygonal porticoed atrium (2) steps lead down to a porticoed horseshoe-shaped latrine (6) and to the baths (7–12), where spatial architecture runs riot, with single and double apses, a clover-leaf, and an octagonal frigidarium or room for taking a cold plunge (9). The middle terrace, east of the baths, centers on a huge trapezoidal peristyle (15), with a complex fountain, embellished by a fish mosaic, in the middle, and living rooms opening off to north and south. South of the peristyle a higher terrace is occupied by an odd elliptical court, shaped like a flattened egg, with a buttressed apse at the west end, the trilobate dining room at the east, and a triple set of conventional rectangular rooms, with mosaics of Cupids vintaging and fishing, to the north and south. The total effect is of an agreeable contrast between straight and curved walls. Returning to the rectangular peristyle, we find to the east of it a long double-apsed corridor, like the narthex, or long narrow portico, in front of an early Christian church. East of this is a suite of rooms centering on the vast, off-centered, apsed basilica—larger than Domitian’s on the Palatine in Rome—which was the earliest part of the villa excavated. On either side of this is a series of rectangular and apsed rooms, the private quarters and nursery, to judge by the mosaics. An aqueduct limits the villa on the north and east. The servants’ quarters are not yet excavated; they probably lay to the southwest, to the left of the monumental entrance (1). The whole is complicated, consistent, functional, organic, clearly the work of a master architect who will challenge comparison with the builder of the Sanctuary of Fortune at Praeneste or with Hadrian himself.
The mosaics must have been done in a hurry by huge gangs of craftsmen, probably imported from North Africa, since the technique resembles that of mosaics at Volubilis, Hippo, Carthage, and Lepcis. Mosaic-making is slow work; nowadays it takes a careful workman six days to lay a square meter of tesserae. To finish the job in the space of a few years must have required a swarm of as many as 500 artisans.
Apart from their vast extent and their subject-matter—of which more in the sequel—the mosaics are of prime importance for the contribution they make to dating the villa. About its date there is controversy. Professor Biagio Pace (who excavated here in the ’30’s), relying on stylistic similarities to late (fifth century A.D.) mosaics in Ravenna and Constantinople, would date the villa in about A.D. 410, and ascribe its ownership to a rich Sicilian landed proprietor. Pace’s pupil G. V. Gentili, who was in charge of the 1950 excavations, argues, following the Norwegian archaeologist H. P. L’Orange, for an earlier date. One piece of evidence not adduced by him is conclusive in his favor. The double-apsed entrance (8) to the baths contains a spirited mosaic depicting the Circus Maximus in Rome, full of life and movement, with the chariots of the four stables, the Greens, Blues, Whites, and Reds, all represented. The Green—the Emperor’s favorite—wins, not without a collision. Down the center of the oval track runs the spina, or division-wall, surmounted by various monuments, including a single obelisk in the center ([Fig. 13.3]). Now it is known that Augustus set up an obelisk in the Circus Maximus, and that in A.D. 357 Constantius added another: therefore any representation of the Circus with only one obelisk must be earlier than 357. Pace’s late date is therefore excluded.
Is there any possibility of still more precise dating? Gentili thinks there is. Beginning from the a priori proposition that a complex architecturally and artistically as grand as this must be beyond the means of any private citizen, however rich, he assumes that the villa must have been built to the order of an Emperor. Which one? To answer this question he looked among the mosaics for possible portraits, and he found them in several places. For example, in the vestibule (13) between the baths and the trapezoidal peristyle (15) there is an obvious portrait study of the mistress of the villa flanked by two children, presumably her son and daughter. The son has a squint. He is represented again, with the same squint, in the northeast apse of the frigidarium (9), in the room of the small hunting scene (23), and in the vestibule of Cupid and Pan (35). (The effect of the squint is achieved by setting one eye with a square tessera, the other with a triangular one.)
Fig. 13.3 Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, Circus Maximus mosaic. (Dorothy MacKendrick photo)