Note 142 — Chapter VI

The ultimate derivation of the word ‘mosaic’ is a difficult problem. Its immediate parent is the late-Latin ‘musivum’ which is generally connected with the Greek μουσεῖον, meaning a ‘place of the Muses.’ With this significance, the Greek word in its Latinized form ‘museum’ is suitably applied to collections of works of art and similar objects of aesthetic interest and value. A ‘place of the Muses’ may however be of a different kind. The Muses, like other nymphs, were worshipped in grottoes as guardian genii of fountains, and Pliny, Hist. Nat., XXXVI, 21, writes of ‘erosa saxa in aedificiis, quae musaea vocant, dependentia ad imaginem specus arte reddendam,’ where the suggestion is of a rustic grotto like that in the Boboli Gardens. Such grottoes, natural or artificial, might fittingly be decked with shells and coloured stones and any bright inlay that offered itself. If incrustations of the kind we call mosaic were actually met with in these haunts of the Muses, the work might readily be called by a name suggestive of these same nymphs, and this might be applied later on to tesselated work in general. There is however no proof, either in Pliny or elsewhere, that what we call mosaic was actually so used, and it has been questioned by more than one authority whether there is really any connection between the word ‘mosaic,’ in its various forms, and the Muses. An oriental derivation has even been suggested for the term.

Dr Albert Ilg, in an exceedingly learned paper on the subject in the Wiener Quellenschriften, Neue Folge, V, 158 f., offered an entirely new explanation of the word ‘mosaic,’ which he maintained had in its original sense nothing to do with inlaid work at all, but rather with gilding. He connected it with a root ‘mus’ or ‘mos,’ with a sense of ‘beating’ or ‘grinding,’ and instanced the mediaeval Latin term ‘mosnerium,’ which Ducange notices as equivalent to ‘molendinum,’ ‘mill.’ ‘Musivum opus’ would refer on this view to the gilding process in which the gold is ground to powder or beaten out; and Ilg affirmed ‘Musaicum im alten Sinne kann nur eigentlich Vergoldung, nicht das moderne Mosaik, bezeichnen.’ If the word at first meant ‘gilded work’ it would later on be extended to what we know as ‘mosaic,’ because of the use in mediaeval mosaics of the familiar gold background. The argument of Dr Ilg is not convincing, and the question must be considered still open. Theophilus, for example, Lib. II, c. 12, uses ‘musivum opus’ for inlaid work in which there is no question of gold.