Experts Are Unraveling the Mysteries of This Breathtaking 2,000-Year-Old Mosaic Depicting Alexander the Great in Battle

A famous Roman mosaic depicting Alexander the Great is revealing new insights into antiquity. As part of an ongoing restoration, researchers have learned that the artwork’s stones came from quarries across Europe and North Africa.

The 2,000-year-old mosaic comes from the ruins of Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was buried in volcanic ash in 79 C.E. after Mount Vesuvius’ eruption. Archaeologists found the artwork in the floor of an extravagant mansion in Pompeii known as the House of the Faun in 1831. About a decade later, it was moved to the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, where it’s been housed ever since.

Per the museum, the “fragile” mosaic has been undergoing a long, complex conservation process since 2020. The first phase focused on examining it using noninvasive methods, including videomicroscopy, infrared thermography and portable X-ray fluorescence. According to a study published this week in the journal PLOS One, researchers identified ten colors of tesserae in the mosaic—including shades of red, yellow, green, blue, pink, white, black, gray and brown—as well as a variety of “micro-textures” that were “masterfully combined to enhance artistic effects.”

The mosaic depicts a battle: Surrounded by a mess of fighting cavalry, Alexander wields a long spear. Opposite him is another leader often identified as the Persian king Darius III. The mosaic probably depicts the Battle of Issus in 333 B.C.E., in which Alexander faced off against the Persian leader and emerged victorious. From Persia, Alexander continued conquering eastward. By the end of his life in 323 B.C.E., the Macedonian king had secured an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to modern-day Pakistan.

“The Alexander Mosaic is one of the most impressive artworks of … antiquity by any standard and the most important mosaic of the Roman age,” write the researchers in the study. “The image of Alexander depicted in the central scene of the mosaic is perhaps the most iconic and well-known representation of his face in ancient art.”

Mosaics were a flourishing art form in the Roman Empire, where artisans pioneered the incorporation of tesserae (cubes of stone, ceramic and glass). Today, they are among the best-preserved pieces of Roman art.

The researchers found that the mosaic’s creators paid “particular attention to Alexander’s face,” according to Live Science’s Laura Geggel. His visage is made up of several different hues of pink tesserae, each with their own “luminescence effects,” per the study. This variation is probably related to the stones’ unique chemical compositions.

On the mosaic’s surface, experts discovered natural wax and gypsum, which were probably left over from previous conservation efforts. The researchers sorted the mosaic’s tesserae material into four key groups: vitreous (glass-like), calcium carbonate-based, silicate-based and a combination of the latter two. Based on similarities between the tesserae and mining areas around the Mediterranean region, they say the rocks could have come from Italy, Greece, the Iberian Peninsula and Tunisia.

Some of the white tesserae resemble Marmor Lunensis—a marble extracted from quarries in the Apuan Alps in Italy, which Romans mined between the first century B.C.E. and the third century C.E. The pale pink stones may be Breccia Nuvolata marble, found all around the Mediterranean, while the darker pinks may be Marmo Rosa, which comes from Portugal.

The restoration process is still ongoing. As the study authors write, “The combination of these new data, along with information obtained from a new instrumental investigation campaign planned for the mosaic surface in the final phases of the restoration operations, will further enrich our knowledge of this superlative work of ancient art.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.