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Even the entrance bespoke the lavish millionaire, eager to conquer difficulties, jealous of achieving the impossible, and never haggling when his fancies were concerned. The spacious hall, paved with costly mosaics, had been transformed into a conservatory full of flowers, which were renewed every morning.
And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines, beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago.
We find the primeval Byzantine type, or at least the exact reproduction of it, in the most ancient western churches, and preserved to us in the mosaics of Rome, Ravenna, and Capua. These remains are nearly all of the same date, much later than the single figures of Christ as Redeemer, and belonging unfortunately to a lower period and style of art.
Kemble in her sunny second-story back, would call down through the purposely opened floor register. "Lilly, not so fast on that part." "Yes'm." Were it not that the salient spots, the platform places in experience, are floored over in little more or less identical mosaics of all the commonplace day by days, Lilly Becker, at the rented-by-the-month piano in her parents' back parlor in Mrs.
The figures are very nicely drawn, and are very beautifully cut, and when finished are set as pins, bracelets, and other ornaments. The mosaics, on the other hand, are made in a very different way. In these, the design is represented by different colored stones or bits of glass worked in together, with great care, in an opening made in the material serving for the groundwork.
Marucchi puts it at the end of the second century A.D., while Delbrueck makes it the early part of the first century B.C., and thinks the mosaics were the gift of Sulla. Delbrueck does not make his point at all, and Marucchi is carried too far by a desire to establish a connection at Praeneste between Fortuna and Isis.
Each of the hundreds of sculptured works which here had found a home was the masterpiece of some great artist; as the curious visitor lingered in loving contemplation of the mosaics on the polished floor, or examined the ornamental mouldings that framed the reliefs, dividing the walls into panels, he was filled with wonder and delight at the beauty, the elegance and the inventiveness that had given charm, dignity, and significance to every detail.
In many of the rooms were those superb antique cabinets which I admire more than any other furniture ever invented; only these were of unexampled art and glory, inlaid with precious stones, and with beautiful Florentine mosaics, both of flowers and landscapes, each cabinet worth a lifetime's toil to make it, and the cost a whole palace to pay for it.
Let her plant Medicis and build grand monuments over them to testify how gratefully she was wont to lick the hand that scourged her. Magnanimous Florence! Her jewelry marts are filled with artists in mosaic. Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world. Florence loves to have that said. Florence is proud of it. Florence would foster this specialty of hers.
I remember distinctly enough, however, the tall basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an exchange or custom-house modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at Constantinople. It has a great span of height and a great solemnity, as well as a choir densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the time of Justinian.
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