Oceanus, ancient god of the sea, rises from the deep with titanic force. His hair is a mass of heavy, wet tendrils, like seaweed dragged onto shore by the surf. Coral branches and lobster claws grow from the top of his head. Dolphins swim out of his beard. Water streams from the corners of his mouth.
With gray-streaked brows and a pensive gaze, this Oceanus is an old man with a mission. If he doesn't suck you into "Stories in Stone: Conserving Mosaics of Roman Africa," an exhibition opening Thursday at the Getty Villa, nothing will.
"He's our rock star," Janet Grossman, Getty associate curator of antiquities, says of the 3rd century artwork that once lined the floor of a Roman-style bath in Tunisia. At the Villa, the roughly 7-by-6-foot fragment of a mosaic pavement is placed on a gallery wall at the end of a corridor, where it can be seen by visitors entering the show.
It's a stunning sight. Composed of thousands of bits of colored limestone, the panel is more than an intricately detailed, emotionally compelling face. Aicha Ben Abed, the director of monuments and sites at Tunisia's National Institute of Cultural Heritage and curator of the exhibition, deems it the masterpiece among many surviving interpretations of a popular theme.
Still, Oceanus has competition in "Stories in Stone," the first major U.S. show of mosaics from Tunisia. Consider an image of Medusa's head, wreathed in snakes, or terrifyingly naturalistic depictions of lions and a tiger ripping into the flesh of other beasts. Or, for something different, a finely executed remnant of an "unswept floor" pavement, depicting cracked eggshells, fruits rinds, vegetable peels and other garbage strewn across a kitchen floor where waste is not a problem and servants clean up messes.
Inspired by a Getty Conservation Institute program designed to train Tunisians to preserve their nation's extraordinary mosaic heritage, the exhibition is a collaborative project of the institute, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Institut National du Patrimoine in Tunisia. Ben Abed selected 26 works from Tunisian national museums' rich collections of ancient mosaics, including unsurpassed holdings of Roman pavements.
Working with co-curators Grossman and Kristin Kelly, an assistant director at GCI, she drew from the Bardo Museum, which maintains the world's largest collection of mosaics in a 19th century palace in Tunis, and smaller museums in Carthage, Sousse, Sfax, Nabeul and El Jem. Getty antiquities conservators Jerry Podany and Eduardo Sanchez were responsible for cleaning and conserving many of the works in the exhibition.
