Untitled 1
VILLA ADRIANA by MARINA DE FRANCESCHINI
Related Books

VILLA ADRIANA, ACCADEMIA. AN EXTRAORDINARY MOSAIC PUZZLE

The Accademia of Villa Adriana – the highest and least known area of ​​the Villa – is still privately owned; thanks to the courtesy of the owners I was able to survey and study the site several years ago with the help of the architect Umberto Pavanello.
For the survey we used the Laser Scanner, a technology that at the time was just at its beginnings, and today is commonly used by archaeologists. We were the first to use Laser Scanner at Villa Adriana.

mosaico-villa-adriana.jpgIn the eighteenth century, Monsignor Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti excavated the Accademia, finding magnificent sculptures: the Centaurs and the Red Faun, as well as the famous Mosaic of the Doves, that today are in the Capitoline Museums of Rome.

During his excavations, Furietti found many fragments of mosaics, and had the idea of ​​using them to make table tops, launching a fashion that also spread to England among the Lord who at the time visited Italy during the Grand Tour, the cultural education trip of the aristocracy of the time.

One of the modern walls of the garden of the Accademia is decorated with several beautiful fragments of ancient polychrome mosaic, most likely found in the nineteenth century, the time of the last excavations by Francesco Bulgarini, who in 1848 published a book on the Villa. Luckily he decided to use them to decorate the garden wall.

We measured and photographed the fragments, noting that there were many different designs. We had before us a real "puzzle" that we were able to solve thanks to Photoshop.
We "rectified" the images, making them flat, and placed various fragments side by side. In this way we reconstructed five different drawings.

The result of this study was presented at the Aiscom Conference in Cremona in 2012 (Italian Association for the Study and Conservation of Mosaics) and subsequently published.

Here we show two different drawings. 
The first has a series of squares decorated with flowers of various shapes and colors, surrounded by rectangles and squares.
The second has large circles formed by four peltae (the shields of the Amazons) arranged around a central square decorated with other polychrome flowers.

These two drawings are very rare and find few comparisons in the Roman world. This means that, like the mosaics of the Hospitalia – which we have illustrated in another article on this blog – their drawings were exclusively "custom made" for the emperor Hadrian.

The same thing goes for example for the capitals: those currently visible in the imperial Triclinium are unique models, created only for the emperor.

We have no evidence to attribute these mosaics to a specific area of ​​the building, which has never been excavated in modern times with scientific methods.
However, we have the description of Pirro Ligorio who in the sixteenth century wrote in his manuscript Codices that he had seen in the central portico of the Accademia a «mosaic on a white background, but in it fake various foliage and scattered flowers», words that could in fact refer to the first of these mosaics.

Bibliography: De Franceschini M. "Uno straordinario puzzle musivo  nell'Accademia della Villa Adriana di Tivoli" in Atti XVIII convegno Aiscom, Cremona 2012, Tivoli 2013, pp. 739-748.



Villa Adriana - Progetto Accademia
©2023-24 Marina De Franceschini
www.rirella-editrice.com

e-Mail: rirella.editrice@gmail.com
VILLA ADRIANA di Marina De Franceschini

Home  |   Privacy  |  Cookies  | nPress Admin


ennegitech web e social marketing
Sviluppato da E-TECH su nPress 2404