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Vitrum Annulare, Pastes

Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Page of 384 Vitrum Annulare, Pastes Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
336                 ÍÁTURAL HISTORY OF GEMS.
early period of the Church, is manifest from Tertullian's apostrophe (De Penitentia) : "Where is the lost sheep? let the very paintings upon your drinking-cups (calicum) come forward." But the invention of this species of deco­ration goes much further back, as is manifest from the exquisite portrait of a child, worthy of the best times of Roman art, now in the Townlej' Collection. Another piece figured by Millin (Gal. Myth. pi. 33) has full-lengths of three girls, Gelasia, Licoris, Comasia (whose names plainly indicate their profession), portrayed as the Graces, with the motto in Grœco-Latin, " Pieté Zésete multis annis,"— Drink : ma}' you live many years.
"Mosaic pavements," observes Pliny (xxxvi. 64), "have been driven from our floors and have migrated to our ceilings : and are made of glass, a new invention this ; for Agrippa in the baths he built in Borne used terra-cotta decorations painted in encaustic in the heated chambers, for the other parts employing stucco-work, whereas he would certainly have made his ceilings of glass had the invention existed in his time." The first species of mosaic, the lithos-troton, was made, as its Greek name denotes, out of minute bits of marble "parvolis crustis," and the earliest example known in Italy was the floor of the Temple of Fortune at Prœneste built by Sulla. Cav. Barberi, director of the Papal Mosaic-studio, once informed me that all the finest antique mosaics, such as Hadrian's Doves, are entirely composed of cubes of natural marbles of divers colours : afterwards bits of glass were introduced for the brighter tints (of which a striking example may be found in the Circencester pave­ments) but mosaics of the Lower Empire of which the earliest remaining specimen is the ceiling of Sta. Costanza, are entirely composed of cubes of coloured glass roughly broken from the mass.
Hadrian sent his brother-in-law Servianus as a present
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