John Berger on mosaic

John Berger on mosaic, from Confabulations.

https://lithub.com/john-berger-tells-a-fish-story-and-more/

I want to go 30 kilometers south to the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, outside Ravenna, and there I want to show you a basin mosaic in the sixth-century apse. It has the form of a scallop shell, a good ten meters in diameter... 

The basin mosaic shows the earth and sky, with trees, birds, grass, stones, sheep. At the top is the open hand of God no larger than a pebble. In the centre is the head of Christ, no larger than the palm of God’s small hand. The principal colors are greens, white, gold, and a turquoise blue. Its nominal subject is the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor in Galilee (see chapter 9, St. Mark’s Gospel). But what it does as a mosaic is to transfigure space! Perspective and vanishing points are abolished. Each entity we see—be it a flower, a sheep, a tuft of grass, a pebble—is at the center of the whole; nothing in the scene is marginal. 

The arching mosaic evokes in terms of space something like what eternity may evoke in terms of time. It simultaneously contains and abolishes space. Distance here brings together instead of separating. 

How does it achieve such a transfiguration? The secret is in the way the mosaic’s tesserae play with the light. These tiny cubic pieces of glass, marble, and mineral generate, because of how they are placed together, an extraordinary visual energy. How do they do this? 

The tesserae vary in their different tints of the same colors. No two are quite the same. 

The angle at which they were inserted into the mortar (14 centuries ago) also varies, sector by sector, and this means that the light they reflect is in places bright and in other places opaque—as happens in nature when light is reflected off moving water. And, finally, the lines of the tesserae—the convoys in which they proceed across the curved mosaic—are never straight but always more or less serpentine. They proceed like eels. 

When you look up and watch the whole mosaic, everything you see is motionless and calm and at the same time part of a ceaseless orbital spin! 

This is why each entity—each tree or flower or sheep or stone or prophet—wherever it has been placed and whatever its size—becomes, when you watch it, the center of everything surrounding it.