Monday 25 January 2010

Mosaics: Bardo Museum

The Bardo Museum in Tunis is rightly acclaimed for its impressive collection of Roman mosaics. Probably the most famous is the one depicting Odyseuss and the sirens (there was even a copy of it at Tunis Airport!) The story goes that Circe warns Odysseus about the dangers he will face at sea including the Sirens. In the adventure of the Argonauts, Jason and his men faced the danger of the Sirens with the help of the singing of Orpheus. Odysseus has no Orpheus to drown out the lovely voices, so he orders his men to stuff their ears with wax and tie him to a mast so he can't escape, but can still hear them singing. What I loved about many of the mosaics was their domesticity - depictions of houses , gardens, foods and pets( or is that food?!) abound
Among the purely decorative , there were lots of peacocks and feathers (more of those in another post)

On a corridor floo r , I was rather taken with this abstract wavy pattern.

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