Brooklyn Museum Exhibition: "Tree of Paradise"

The Brooklyn Museum is currently running an exhibition of "The Tree of Paradise," comprising its collection of 12 sections from a 6th century synagogue floor mosaic from Hammam Lif, Tunisia. At the time, Hammam Lif was called Naro and was part of the western Roman Empire. The town was mostly Christian but had a Jewish community of long standing. Other sections from the floor are in Tunisia, and still others have been lost. But for this exhibition the museum had a full-scale floor painted with the complete design and then placed its own panels where they belonged in the design.

The subject matter of the mosaics is Jewish: Creation, Paradise, and the assemblage of Jewish symbols that one sees in Jewish artifacts of the later Roman period (in a circle, a menorah surrounded by other smaller items from the Temple). The style is a very interesting variation on the style that obtained at the time in the Greek East and in Europe. Like the latter two areas, North African art was abstract and cerebral, with little interest in the naturalism that had characterized Roman art before the 3rd century (and that would appeal so strongly to people in the Renaissance). But, judging from these mosaics, which one curator says are quite typical of all North African art of the period, the style is calmer, less busy, content to say more with less.

Now, this judgment has to be provisional, because of the way the mosaics have been treated since their rediscovery in the mid-19th century. The menorah circles, for example, were "restored" by an inexpert hand some time after the rediscovery, so one cannot be sure if they really look as the artist intended. But if they do, they represent a remarkable example of stylizing -- unlike both the contemporary art of Europe and the East and the prevailing taste of nineteenth-century Europe. In other menorah circles, we find more or less realistic images of the "ethrog," a citron-like fruit with a nubbly skin. In these, the characteristic shape of the ethrog is expressed by a single curvy line, one tessera thick. Similarly, the circles include a one-curvy-line representation of a lulav, the palm branch used during the Sukkoth holiday.

This expressive simplicity characterizes other choices the artist made. He apparently chose to work with a restricted palette. (Again, this judgment is provisional, because an ill-considered effort at preserving the mosaics when the museum acquired them in 1905 has dulled their color. But even allowing for brighter colors, the colors seem to be in a narrow range.) Also, to represent the sea teeming with life that God created on the fifth day, the artist chose not a large number of fish but just two very large ones that fill most of the stylized "sea." Even though large, the fish are not fitted out with a lot of detail -- they're just big fish, creatures of a big God.

In the upper left of the Creation area of the mosaic is a simple jagged form that some scholars take to be a stylization of fingers -- in other words, the hand of God, rendered in a way that avoids anthropomorphizing. This stylistic device seems to be in tune with the other choices the artist has made, though once again one must be provisional because other scholars decline to interpret the form as fingers at all.

Thus we seem to have a style of art that shares its abstract, cerebral quality with the rest of the contemporary Mediterranean world but opts for a simplicity of line and statement more in tune with, say, Japanese prints and the western art they inspired. It is exciting that such a style should have taken hold in this one not-so-prominent corner of the Mediterranean world.

The museum's own web page on the mosaics is at the address: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/tree_of_paradise/

There is a picture of the Hammam Lif menorah circles at this address:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/romanempire/ss/paradise_2.htm


And here are two 4th-century menorah circles from a burial in Rome. They are in glass, much smaller than the circles at Hammam Lif and yet full of much more stuff.