Anthony Schiavo has been designing and executing mosaics for almost eight decades.
On November 9th a small group of classicists, artists, and visiting scholars gathered outside Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. to mark the arrival of two mosaic panels designed by renowned artist Hildreth Meière. The panels were part of a large-scale, triptych mural with the center panel depicting Hercules’ passage through the Straight of Gibraltar, and the two side panels featuring the Pillars of Hercules.
Large mosaics such as these are often a collaborative endeavor, and Anthony Schiavo, who stood among the group that day, had worked on these panels twice. As a young man, he directed the team that fabricated the mosaic. Over 50 years later an unexpected sequence of events brought the mosaics back into his life. Schiavo says the story of how these masterpieces were created, lost, and restored is "a mosaic of a mosaic”, with each individual taking their own place in the progression of the story. The movement or flow created by the arrangement of tesserae in a mosaic is called the andamento, from the Italian verb meaning ‘to move’. This key concept guides the artist during composition, and also when dividing or joining individual sections of the work. For Schiavo, the andamento dei fatti or ‘turn of fate’ leading to this moment began in his hometown, long ago before the first tile was set in place.
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