United States or Jordan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To the west, between the altar-screen the unhappy effect of which is painfully conspicuous from this point and the site of the shrine, there is some very interesting mosaic pavement, containing the signs of the zodiac, and emblems of virtue and vice, an example of the Opus Alexandrinum, which appears in the floors of most of the Roman basilicas.
We went into the little damp church, with a twelfth-century campanile and well in the rose-garden; a deserted little place, only a bit of opus Alexandrinum, and a string of Cosmati work remaining, all the rest overlaid by the frescoes and stuccoes of a seventeenth-century Rasponi.
A splendid specimen of opus Alexandrinum, the finest north of the Alps, exists in the presbytery of Westminster Abbey. Another description of building is customarily met with in connection with early Christian churches, the baptistery. This is commonly a detached building, and almost always circular or polygonal.
The last term to be applied to arabesque-work is grotesque, or promiscuously interspersed; and the description here given leaves out the most beautiful kind of arabesque, namely, the inlaid work of geometrical figures in colored marbles, in which the Arabs far surpassed the older opus Alexandrinum.
"Do you think it is in the English language, or do you not?" "I don't think I can, but I'll try. If it takes me two years, I'll try." There are witnesses who can testify that I have used no artifice. I have, on the contrary, cut away priceless slabs of opus alexandrinum.
If this be so, we have in this first place of Christian worship established in Rome the first instance of the application of Opus Alexandrinum to the decoration of a church. In the middle ages the fashion was beautifully imitated by artists of the Cosmati family and their school; and the mosaic pavements of this kind in the medieval churches of Rome are no older than this period.
For this lazy sea appears to wash no pebbles of its own bringing, but only fragments of stone brought by man, broken off man's buildings, shot by him into the Tiber, in the days, no doubt, when columns were sawed into discs and smashed into petal-shaped wedges for the Opus Alexandrinum.
He seems to have been a well-educated man, but without any particular literary capacity. It was uncertain, even to the careful research of Suetonius, whether the narrative of the campaigns in Egypt and Pontus, known as the Bellum Alexandrinum, was written by him or by another officer of Caesar's, Gaius Oppius.
But we have reason to believe that the Opus Alexandrinum in two of the chapels of Santa Maria degli Angeli was taken from the Baths of Diocletian; while the splendid pavement of the whole church, naves, transept, and choir of Santa Croce in Jerusalemme, formed originally part of the decorations of the Sessorian Palace of Sextus Varius, the father of Heliogabalus, after whom the church is sometimes called the Sessorian Basilica.
The floor of most of them was formed in the style of mosaic known as "opus Alexandrinum," and the large sweeping, curved bands of coloured material with which the main outlines of the patterns are defined, and the general harmony of colour among the porphyries and other hard stones with which these pavements were executed, combine to satisfy the eye.
Word Of The Day