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How to install a mosaic.Get one-on-one expert advice from our lead designer to help you transform any area around your home or work.
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Byzantine mosaic is the high point of the medium, and the reason is a single decision: the Byzantines took mosaic off the floor and put it on the wall.
Roman mosaic was largely a floor art — durable, walked on, lit from above. Moving it onto walls and vaults changed everything about how it was made, because a surface you look at rather than stand on can use materials that would never survive underfoot. Chief among them, glass. And once glass was in play, so was gold.
This guide covers what Byzantine mosaics are made of, how they were built, what makes the style recognisable, where the surviving work is, and why so much of it is missing.
Stone, glass and mortar. Those are the three materials, and each does a different job.
| Material | Role |
|---|---|
| Stone | Cut marble and other natural stone. Used for skin tones, architecture, drapery and anything needing a matte, natural colour. Durable and subtle, but limited to colours that occur in rock |
| Glass (smalti) | Opaque coloured glass, made in slabs and broken into cubes. Gives saturated colour that stone cannot — deep blues, greens and reds — and a slightly uneven surface that catches light |
| Gold and silver leaf glass | Metal leaf sealed between a glass base and a thin glass film, then cut. This is the material that defines the style |
| Mortar | Lime-based, laid in successive coats. The final coat is the bed the tesserae are pressed into while it is still soft, and it sets around them |
The mortar is the part people forget, and it is structural. A Byzantine wall mosaic is not tiles glued to a surface; it is thousands of pieces embedded in a lime bed that hardens into a single mass. That is a large part of why the work is still on the walls fifteen centuries later.
For how these materials are still used, see our guide to tesserae and mosaic stones.
A gold tessera is a sandwich. A thin sheet of gold leaf is laid on a base of molten glass and covered with a fine transparent film called a cartellina, and the whole thing is fused. The glass protects the leaf, which is why the gold has not worn away.
The gold ground — a whole wall or vault of it, with no landscape or architecture behind the figures — is the single most recognisable feature of the style. It is not decoration. A gold background removes the setting entirely, so the figures occupy no particular place: not a room, not a landscape, nowhere earthly.
And the pieces are deliberately not flat. Setters pressed gold tesserae into the mortar at slightly varying angles, so no two faces catch the light identically. Under the flickering lamps and candles these buildings were actually lit by, the surface does not sit still — it shifts as you move and as the flames move. Photographed under even electric light, most of that effect is lost, which is why Byzantine mosaics are so much better in person than in reproduction.
A handful of conventions, applied consistently for a thousand years.
It is easy to read these as a failure of naturalism, as if the ability to draw convincing space had been lost. It had not. Byzantine artists were working towards something other than likeness, and the conventions are the point rather than the limitation.
The subject matter is overwhelmingly religious, and the repertoire is small and repeated: Christ as Pantocrator or Good Shepherd, the Virgin and Child, apostles and saints, imperial portraits, and the great feast scenes.
That repetition was deliberate. These were not original compositions competing for attention but a settled visual language, where the point of a familiar image set in gold was recognition rather than novelty.
The same subjects are still made the same way. Our religious mosaics work from the same conventions, and custom mosaics covers commissioned pieces.
| Place | What is there | When |
|---|---|---|
| Ravenna, Italy | The densest concentration anywhere. San Vitale holds the Justinian and Theodora panels; the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia is a small vaulted room of gold stars on deep blue; Sant'Apollinare Nuovo has its long processions of saints | 5th–6th c. |
| Hagia Sophia, Istanbul | Imperial portraits and the Deësis. Plastered over after 1453 and uncovered again in the twentieth century, which is why the surviving panels are fragmentary | 6th–13th c. |
| Daphni, Hosios Loukas and Nea Moni, Greece | The middle Byzantine group, listed together by UNESCO. Daphni's Pantocrator in the dome is the best known | 11th c. |
| Chora Church, Istanbul | Late Byzantine work, and noticeably more fluid and naturalistic than what came before | 14th c. |
| St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai | The Transfiguration apse, remarkably intact because the site was never sacked | 6th c. |
Ravenna is the one to go to if you only go to one. It is also the reason this material survived at all: the city was a Byzantine capital in the west, and its churches escaped both the iconoclasts and the later conversions.
If you are planning around mosaics, our guide to mosaic art cities covers the wider circuit.
Twice, the empire destroyed its own religious images. The iconoclastic controversies — roughly 726 to 787, and again 814 to 843 — turned on whether depicting holy figures was itself idolatry. The iconoclasts won for long enough to strip figural mosaics out of churches across the empire and replace them with crosses and plain ornament.
Almost nothing figural survives from Constantinople before 843. What we have is what was beyond reach: Ravenna in the west, Sinai in the desert. The great period of mosaic that followed the restoration of images in 843 is in a real sense a second start.
Then 1453 and the conversion of churches to mosques, after which figural mosaics were plastered over rather than destroyed — which, as it turned out, preserved them. The Hagia Sophia panels came back out of the plaster largely intact.
The style did not stop at 1453. It moved into Orthodox church decoration, where it is still the working convention, and it resurfaced in Western art whenever someone went and looked.
The clearest case is Gustav Klimt, who visited Ravenna in 1903 and whose gold period followed directly. The flattened figures and the gold grounds of The Kiss come out of San Vitale more than out of anything in Vienna.
Byzantine ornament also fed into Islamic mosaic, which took the geometry and the gold and removed the figures — see our guide to Islamic mosaic art.
Religious mosaics · Mosaic wall art · Custom mosaics
Stone, glass and mortar. Cut marble for natural tones, opaque coloured glass called smalti for saturated colour, and gold or silver leaf sealed inside glass for the backgrounds — all pressed into a lime mortar bed that hardens around them.
Gold leaf was laid on a base of molten glass, covered with a thin transparent glass film and fused. The glass protects the metal, which is why the gold still looks like gold after fifteen hundred years.
To remove the setting. With no landscape or architecture behind them, the figures are placed nowhere earthly. The gold also reflects lamplight, so the surface moves in the low light these buildings were lit by.
Roman mosaic was largely floors, in stone, with naturalistic scenes and perspective. Byzantine mosaic moved onto walls and vaults, which allowed glass and gold, and traded naturalism for frontal figures, flattened space and hierarchy of scale.
The Justinian and Theodora panels at San Vitale in Ravenna; the vault of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia; the Deësis at Hagia Sophia; the Pantocrator in the dome at Daphni; and the Transfiguration apse at St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai.
Broadly the fourth century to 1453, with the finest surviving work from the fifth and sixth centuries in Ravenna and a second flowering from the ninth century onward, after the destruction of images ended.
Two iconoclastic periods, roughly 726–787 and 814–843, during which figural religious images were removed across the empire. Almost nothing figural survives in Constantinople from before 843; what remains is mostly in places the iconoclasts did not reach, such as Ravenna and Sinai.
Legibility. These mosaics are high on walls and in domes, seen from a long way below. Enlarged eyes and elongated features read clearly at that distance, where naturalistic proportions would not.
Directly. Gustav Klimt visited Ravenna in 1903 and his gold period followed, and the flattened gold-ground compositions of works like The Kiss come straight out of what he saw there.
