Orpheus!

It’s sixth day here in Rome. I am really enjoying the city but unfortunately my legs are sore. Waking up at 7 a.m. I forced myself to follow my painful legs to my classmates with my sleepy eyes. I had a cup of coffee before I left St. John’s but that’s does not really wake me up.

We arrived at Villa Borghese and waited Dan to get the tickets for the gallery of Borghese. I was still wanted sit and rest. We got into the gallery and I walked into the upper floor and Bang! I saw this mosaic painting and could not stop looking at this artwork.

This mosaic art piece was done by Marcello Provenzale and the title is Orfeo. In the mosaic of Orpheus, animals who are surrounding Orpheus in the center of the mosaic united in a concert, enticed by the melody of Orpheus’ viola. In the figure of Orpheus, he seems like he is soothing the animals with his music. The background of the mosaic looks like a park and Orpheus who is in the center of the painting is sitting in front of a tree. Different kinds of animals are surrounding the Orpheus and listening to the melody of Orpheus’ viola. Some of animals are not really directly looking at Orpheus like the dog in the mosaic. However, the reason I know that they are listening to him is their face expressions are very soothe and calm. Especially, even the lion on the left side does not look scary and look like he is carefully listening at Orpheus’ viola. However, the interesting part is the contrast of the calm face animals and the angry face volcano mountain on the behind of animals on the right side. I could not figure out why the volcano mountain has the angry face but it was very interesting to look at.

The most amazing part of this mosaic is its detail. This work is really interesting because it is made out of really tiny small pieces of tiles. The tiles are small enough to express the face expression of animals and also bring out shades onto the figures in the mosaic. If I did not look at the work carefully, I would not ever realize this is a mosaic artwork. I was just really amazed to see how sophisticatedly the work was completed with various color use.