Waddesdon Manor/Lod Mosaic

[John W Davison]

I visited Waddesdon Manor today (19th C country house built by a British member of the Rothschild family in the style of a French Loire valley chateau) and had an unexpected Roman bonus.

Until 2 November 2014, there is an exhibition of a mosaic from a 3rd C villa at Lod in Israel, near Tel Aviv. The mosaic is very complete and shows various land and sea creatures, including a rather fishy-looking whale. The mosaic was discovered in 1996, removed from the site in 2009 and seems to have been on tour since then, The plan is to house it in a new museum back in Israel in due course.

Not too much seems yet to be known about the context of the site as yet. It is a 3rd C villa so post-dates the Second Jewish Revolt, and there is nothing on the mosaic to indicate whether the owners were Jews, pagans or Christians but the British Museum have provided some artefacts to give it a bit of support and it is a spectacular mosaic, so worth a visit if you are in the South East or Midlands.

Waddesdon Manor is near Aylesbury, not too far from Oxford (so handy if you are in the area visiting the Ashmolean Museum!) and J9 of the M40 motorway. Entrance is included in entry to the house, free to National Trust members. Images of the mosaic can be found on the attached links.

http://www.lodmosaic.org/home.html

http://www.waddesdon.org.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waddesdon_M...chitecture

Regards, John

[Musivarius]

It's definitely worth a visit, not often mosaics go on tour! The whole piece has been finished to a consistently high standard and it's interesting to see the change over from the naturalistic figures of the earlier Roman period to the more 2 dimensional effect of the early Christian period.
There is also a couple of sections of the setting bed that the tesserae were lifted from which shows traces of the painted outlines that were used as guides for setting. I wouldn't say it's huge but if you're interested it's worth seeing while it's over here.

[Gunthamund Hasding]

saw it while in Berlin is really extremely NICE