Roman mosaics exhibit enriched with 16 newly restored works

(ANSA) - ROME, MAR 14 - The exhibition 'The colours of the Romans. Mosaics from the Capitoline Collections', on show in Rome's Montemartini Museum, has been expanded to include a new section presenting 16 newly restored works dating from the late Roman period and never before shown in public. 'The Colors of Marble' presents large marble tesserae mosaics and mosaics made using the opus sectile technique for making elaborate pavement decorations out of cut and shaped pieces of coloured stone.
    "Opus sectile is a technique that developed mainly from the 3rd-4th centuries AD and was mostly used in large rooms. Colored marbles became a way of representing the lives of the patrons and owners of residences, precisely to indulge their need to express luxuriousness and their own possibility of possessing precious materials," said cultural heritage superintendent Claudio Parisi Presicce who, together with Nadia Agnoli and Serena Guglielmi, has curated the exhibition.
    The works on show include mosaics from the Baths of Diocletian using a mix of marble and porphyry, which were found during excavations in 1873, and a large mosaic showing plant and bird motifs from a tomb in the Via Portuense necropolis, which came to light in 1926 during construction of the Gianicolense ring road, near Rome's Trastevere station.
    'The colours of the Romans' is on show in the Montemartini Museum, a former power station, until June 25. (ANSA).