On a hot July day in 1983, 18-year-old herder Samuel López made the find that changed his life and put the central Spanish town of Carranque on the world’s archaeological map. “My heart was pounding,” he said. “I started rummaging through the straw and found another tile and then another … With the stick I used to herd the cows, I scraped the ground and realized I’d found a mosaic.”
López’s family had worked the land around Carranque for centuries. A tall stone ruin, said to be of ancient origin, dominated this parcel of land. Helping his father as a boy, López was no stranger to finding objects left behind long ago on the farm. He had accrued a collection of ceramic fragments and metal items near the stones, but the young man’s discovery in 1983 exceeded all these other finds. Calling on several of his brothers to help, López was stunned to see areas of elaborate mosaics emerging.
López alerted the Museum of Santa Cruz in the nearby city of Toledo. After initial examinations, archaeologists confirmed that the remains of an opulent Roman estate lay under the family’s farmland. The stone ruins were part of a wall from a fourth-century Roman palatial structure. To the south of it stood a villa, named Villa Maternus by the archaeologists for the name found inscribed on a threshold. Excavations revealed much larger works of art depicting mythological scenes. Large sections were intact, including the stunning mosaic of Oceanus with a long, flowing beard.
Flourishing in a last burst of glory before Roman Spain was overrun by invaders in the fifth century, the Villa Maternus was clearly the product of great power and wealth. The mosaics provide rich insight into this time and place, but the identity of the villa’s owner is still a mystery.
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Silver and oil After defeating the Carthaginians in the second century B.C., the Romans seized the Iberian Peninsula in a significant victory. They now controlled the western Mediterranean and the silver mines of southern Spain, whose riches financed the Roman Republic’s ongoing transformation into a huge regional power and later an empire. Among its other important agricultural products, Iberia’s prized olive oil would become a Roman staple, later distributed to every corner of the Roman world.
The excavations that began at Carranque in 1985 confirmed that the villa López discovered had a complex history. Ceramic remains and other structures led archaeologists to date the settlement to the first to second centuries A.D. Later, in the final decades of the fourth century, the complex underwent a series of major renovations, giving the villa the impressive structures and floor plan seen today. This last phase took place during the fourth-century reign of Emperor Theodosius I, whose Spanish origins boosted the importance of the Hispano-Roman elite.
A roof now protects the fourth-century Villa of Maternus at Carranque. In the foreground is the portico, whose circular mosaic once welcomed guests. The roof’s four supporting pillars rest in what would have been the central garden.
Municipality of Carranque
Archaeological studies established that the principal villa structure consisted of a central garden surrounded by a columned veranda, or peristyle. Around the garden were dining and reception rooms, many with rounded apses on their exterior walls.
Costly imported stonework, including porphyry and marble, adorned the walls. Most stunning of all are the mosaic floors. Some of the most complex and best preserved of all Hispano-Roman mosaic art, they were produced, evidently at great expense, by three workshops, each with its own style. The masterpieces they created include narratives depicting scenes from mythology, as well as animal and vegetable details, including partridges, a boar, dogs, baskets of flowers and fruit, and fishes.
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Myths and ladies On the eastern corner of the villa is a domestic space known as a cubiculum. On the threshold mosaic appears the name Maternus, and it is generally believed that this was the master of the house’s name.
The central mosaic dominating the room features the encircled likeness of a woman. Richly dressed, her head is surrounded by a halo, denoting greatness and virtue. Echoing other mosaic figures and themes at Carranque, she could be an allegory of a classical virtue, or the lady of the house, or both. The panels that surround her are unmistakably classical references: mythological figures, including Athena and Hercules, and scenes described in Metamorphoses by first-century poet Ovid.
Haloed with gold, an elegant lady forms the centerpiece of the mosaic in the Villa of Maternus’s cubiculum. Around her are portraits of Roman divinities and mythological scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Municipality of Carranque
In one, the goddess Diana is bathing while a nymph combs her hair. The furtive male figure watching is Actaeon, whom Diana will punish for his voyeurism by turning him into a stag to be hunted down and killed.
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The fusion of hunting and eroticism continues in the mosaic of the triclinium, or dining room, a more public space evidently designed to impress and delight guests. This mosaic likely depicts Adonis, the beautiful youth loved by Venus. He fights a boar that is about to kill him, to the horror of the watching goddess. Below are two wounded dogs, perhaps injured, by the boar. They may be portraits of the estate’s actual hunting dogs.
Another impressive carpet mosaic adorns the principal oecus, or reception area, depicting the gifting of the enslaved girl Briseis to Achilles during the Trojan War. Central to the plot of Homer’s Iliad, the unhappy story of Briseis echoes the fusion of eroticism and violence across the mosaics.
Opposite the entrance to the oecus is an alcove that once contained a fountain. In the recess above it is a magnificent portrait of the god Oceanus. Comprising tiny pieces that create the effect of wavelets or ripples, his flowing beard and somber expression have become the emblematic image of Carranque’s mosaic treasures.
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Hercules appears in a detail of a fourth-century Metamorphoses mosaic in the cubiculum of Carranque’s Villa of Maternus.
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The Pallas Athena from the Villa of Maternus cubiculum in Carranque
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Mystery of Maternus Now in his late 50s and still a resident of Carranque, López has spent his life studying the excavations at the site he unearthed. The ruins are now known to be one of the most significant Hispano-Roman villas yet found. Sited on a key Roman road, it would have dominated the countryside around it in an ostentatious declaration of wealth. Historians have spent many years trying to identify who its powerful owner was.
Some argue that the Maternus named in the mosaicked inscription was Maternus Cynegius. An Iberian-born adviser to Emperor Theodosius, Maternus Cynegius would certainly have had the wealth and confidence to build such a lavish villa. But there is a catch: As a pious Christian, Maternus Cynegius facilitated Theodosius’s attacks on pagans across the empire. It is unlikely that a Christian of such zeal would have commissioned so many mosaics depicting the gods, goddesses, and myths of ancient Rome.
Maternus’s pleasure An inscription found in mosaic form in the villa’s cubiculum is thought to name the villa’s wealthy Roman owner at the end of the fourth century. It also names the artisan responsible for the mosaic work: “Hirinius, from the workshop of Ma … painted this cubicle for Maternus’s pleasure.”
Municipality of Carranque
Rome’s long rule of Iberia ended in the decades shortly after Maternus—whoever he was—renovated his villa and commissioned his mosaics. Vandals and Visigoths invaded the peninsula in the fifth century B.C.
The palace structure to the north of the villa survived and was adapted as a Christian building until it was abandoned. Much of its stone was removed for use in local buildings, until only a portion of the wall remained. The mosaics were buried and lay hidden in the farmland of Castile until that hot day in 1983, when a young herder with an interest in history bent down to peer closer at the past.
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The ruins of the fourth-century palace structure at Carranque lie to the north of where Samuel López first spotted the Roman mosaics in 1983.
Municipality of Carranque
