HISTORY
The history of mosaic creations leads to the 4th and/or 3rd millennium B.C. but the main development is dated from the 6th to 4th century B.C. upwards. The main centres of this decorative art were set in Mesopothamia, ancient Greece, Roman Empire and Byzantium. Firstly, a mosaic was used as a floor or a decoration for a sculpture. It was the Byzantines, who popularized wall and vault mosaics.
The motifs that appear on ancient mosaics, as well as techniques have depended on the age and a territory. The scenes that depict rulers' life, works at
breeding, mythological scenes, griffins and chimeras were often presented at mosaic in ancient Greece and Mesopothamia, usually made of water worn pebbles, later of hand cut stones.
At the Roman era it was fashionable to decorate floors
with geometrical motifs like chessboards, rhombus sequences, spirals, and also mythological scenes. When the
Christianity came, the Holy Bible stories were ilustrated by mosaicists. At the Middle Ages there additionally appeared the scenes with fancy creatures. The art of Islam forbids depicting people, thus the most frequent motifs in mosaic are palaces, temples, the world of fauna and flora, geometrical shapes and quotation from the Koran.
When the Byzantium collapsed, the fine art of mosaics lost its significance and revived in the 11th and 12th century A.D. to be used to decorate churches of Greece, Rome and Venice. After that period, mosaic was again overshadowed by paintings and sculptures until the 19th century. At the time decorating everyday objects and furniture spread and some miniature "stone pictures" arisen (a few centimetres' picture, with tesserae as small as 1 mm). It seems that since the last century a mosaic has been in the heyday and is gladly used to decorate interiors. Contemporary mosaics often imitate ancient mosaics, preserved in museums. They are also reproductions of paintings, photos, trademarks or pictures full of abstraction. Nowadays, the range of possible designs is much wider.
