Identifying mosaic workshops in late antiquity : Epigraphic evidence and a case study

In the first part of this essay, the author tackles the subject of craftsmen making mosaics, their status and their organisation in workshops, analysing if these were stationary or itinerant. According to her, the most probable was a combination of both. She uses literary sources and epigraphic evidence to support her statements. Moreover, she studies the question of pattern books, pointing out that motives circulated over great distances. She illustrates this by taking into account a mosaic dating from the 5th century A.D. found in Halikarnassos, where a lion carries a bull’s head in its mouth or puts its right paw on the bull’s head. The author cites some examples of this motif of a beast with the head of an herbivore, concluding that it was widely distributed across the Roman Empire. In the second part, the author turns to a case study which focuses on a geometric motif known as “tangent four-pointed stars forming lozenges” and on some characteristic borders used in late-antique mosaics in southwest Caria and the Dodecanese in order to distinguish workshops. The author claims that some variations in the details indicate more than one workshop, presumably two or three different ones, all using the same basic model.