At Sea
Ultramarine. The sea today is the deepest, richest blue from horizon to horizon. It is the color of distance; even the idea of this endless blue comes from long ago and far away. The word is derived from the Italian “oltramarino” and means “from beyond the seas,” things strange and exotic and little known. Renaissance artists used the term to refer to the most beautiful and prized blue paints and pigments made from the lovely blue gemstone lapis lazuli, which then came exclusively from remote mines in what is now Afghanistan. This precious color was well known to the Egyptians, the Romans and many other sailors of the Mediterranean. The color of the sky and the sea is the color of transcendence and it was used for the most sacred purposes: to encrust the golden jewelry of Pharaohs and to paint the halo of the Buddha and the veil of the Queen of Heaven.
Roman artists certainly gazed out over the seas into the blue distance, but they also looked down, into the depths, and drew inspiration from the rich menagerie of creatures they found there. The exquisite roman mosaics of North Africa, which we have spent much of the past week viewing in the ruins of the cities and private villas they once decorated, reveal a great fascination with fish and other marine life. As we might expect from the Romans, with their rich pantheon of gods and heroes, there are many delightful fanciful scenes of mermaids, sea dragons, man-eating fish monsters and King Neptune’s chariot, churning through the breakers, drawn by horses with curling fish tails. But even more common are collections of accurately rendered marine life. Courtyard floors and balconies in one villa after another were filled with easily recognizable groupers, flounder, crabs and lobsters, octopus, sharks, sea snakes and even electric rays. It appears that marine creatures were the dinosaurs of the day, weird and wonderful denizens of a strange world that captured the public imagination in a very big way.
Today, crossing the bluest of seas as we leave those ancient cities in our wake and cruise toward Menorca, we have a chance to reflect on our experiences among the incredible antiquities of North Africa. Cyrene, Leptis Magna, Sabratha and all the other remarkable sites we have visited have given us a rare chance to understand the Greeks and Romans as people, who, like ourselves, worked and played and enjoyed learning about the mysterious creatures that lived in the deep blue beside their desert shores.
Ultramarine. The sea today is the deepest, richest blue from horizon to horizon. It is the color of distance; even the idea of this endless blue comes from long ago and far away. The word is derived from the Italian “oltramarino” and means “from beyond the seas,” things strange and exotic and little known. Renaissance artists used the term to refer to the most beautiful and prized blue paints and pigments made from the lovely blue gemstone lapis lazuli, which then came exclusively from remote mines in what is now Afghanistan. This precious color was well known to the Egyptians, the Romans and many other sailors of the Mediterranean. The color of the sky and the sea is the color of transcendence and it was used for the most sacred purposes: to encrust the golden jewelry of Pharaohs and to paint the halo of the Buddha and the veil of the Queen of Heaven.
Roman artists certainly gazed out over the seas into the blue distance, but they also looked down, into the depths, and drew inspiration from the rich menagerie of creatures they found there. The exquisite roman mosaics of North Africa, which we have spent much of the past week viewing in the ruins of the cities and private villas they once decorated, reveal a great fascination with fish and other marine life. As we might expect from the Romans, with their rich pantheon of gods and heroes, there are many delightful fanciful scenes of mermaids, sea dragons, man-eating fish monsters and King Neptune’s chariot, churning through the breakers, drawn by horses with curling fish tails. But even more common are collections of accurately rendered marine life. Courtyard floors and balconies in one villa after another were filled with easily recognizable groupers, flounder, crabs and lobsters, octopus, sharks, sea snakes and even electric rays. It appears that marine creatures were the dinosaurs of the day, weird and wonderful denizens of a strange world that captured the public imagination in a very big way.
Today, crossing the bluest of seas as we leave those ancient cities in our wake and cruise toward Menorca, we have a chance to reflect on our experiences among the incredible antiquities of North Africa. Cyrene, Leptis Magna, Sabratha and all the other remarkable sites we have visited have given us a rare chance to understand the Greeks and Romans as people, who, like ourselves, worked and played and enjoyed learning about the mysterious creatures that lived in the deep blue beside their desert shores.
