Cosmati

In a very minor way, tonight I took a few small footsteps in the journeys of the great Cosmati. Who were the Cosmati, you might ask? If you answered 'the secret society in the film Tomb Raider', that is not correct, however you get extra credit for making me think of Angelina Jolie in shorts with pistols.

















The Cosmati were families of artistic stone workers sharing the name 'Cosma' around 1000 years ago. Several generations of people in the family made very mathematically complex mosaics. Many of their works are geometric styled with triangles, circles, parallel-o-grams, and yes, even rhombuses.
Some typical examples of their work...















Not only known for just architectural mosaics that had the effect of showing you what you see when you rub your eyes way too hard, but they were also well known sculptors and art dealers.

The wealthy and powerful revered their work in the early and even late middle ages. Well heck, even now if I count myself, right? For example, Pope Iulius II had his logo done in their style (he was the 'warrior' pope who layed the first brick of the brand spanking new 'St. Peter's Cathederal' in Rome around 1500).













All manner of medieval palaces used their flooring, for example Ca d'Oro in Venice, not to be much outdone by St. Marks cathedral, had a nice Cosmati styled floor put in on their canal entrance.

An art mosaic project I'm working on requires traditional stones that the Cosmati used once upon a time. I have had some tiny pieces of green serpentine left over, so I've made some of these into triangles like those typically used in the pavements of the Cosmati. I was thinking of making a replica Ca d'Oro floor, but for now, I will just use these triangles for making some 'Cosmati' cufflinks.















That's the kind of thing Bored Neoclassical Guy would do, right?

Why They Carved Backwards (Perché hanno intagliato retromarcia)

A long time ago, people left their mark in wax using intaglio carvings, which are carvings that are the reverse of what you wanted to see, pressed in wax dripped by candle. The primary use was to seal letters, but we cannot rule out that they might also have used them to make candies and little fancy butter pats with them.

Typically, they would be carved from carnelian or sard stone (as in sardonyx) and set in a ring. Carnelian is about my 14th favorite mineral I think. I bought these carnelian stones recently from a place in Colorado fancifully named 'The Gypsum Rose'. They were originally found in Madagascar, which sources some of the best exotic specimens these days. In order for you to have a really good and easily familiar frame of reference for how large the stones are, I included a perfect silver denarius of Alexander the Great with a seated victory in the picture.













The woman image at the top is an intaglio from the first century identified as Augustus Caesar's sister Octavia from the Luigi Cesnola collection provenance. It's weird to think that a family member or she herself might have stamp-sealed scrolls with this very object, or used it as a very small id badge for work or something.

I really want to buy a few tiny diamond bits and give intaglio carving into carnelian a try, but I have to come up with some good subject matter, maybe like the image below? I blame suggested YouTube cartoon watching mostly. I've read that ancient carvers would typically make a normal relief image, then cast that into a hard material, then fit it against the stone when carving to see where material still needed to be removed. That sounds a bit easier than just 'thinking backwards' when carving...

The Getty museum in California has a great exhibit going until September on gems and intaglio carvings by such great artists as Epimenes, Solon and Gnaios. And who can forget Dioskourides? The Getty article covers some information on the counterfeiting of these objects in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Anybody going?

There are quite a few intaglios on Ebay in various qualities, but hardly any of them are authentic antiquities, so as always, please be careful when shopping for old stuff. Particularly careful if the item in question has a Warner Brothers character carved in.

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Voglio ritagliarsi storico firma anelli. Ho potuto acquistare uno, ma tutti vignette. Pertanto, lo so che non antiche. ;)