The Antioch mosaic and the protective eyes of ancient art
From the mosaic of the House of the Evil Eye at Antioch to Attic eye-cups: how ancient art depicted the harmful gaze and fought against it.
Among the most eloquent images of the evil eye that antiquity has left us is a mosaic found at Antioch on the Orontes, today's Antakya in Turkey. It comes from a building that archaeologists named the House of the Evil Eye and is dated to the second century AD. It is now kept in the Hatay Archaeology Museum. It is not an amulet to be worn, but an entrance floor: whoever came in walked over a scene showing the malign eye defeated.
An eye under siege
At the centre of the mosaic stands a large open eye. All around it a host of attackers strikes at it: a trident and a sword pierce it, a raven pecks at it, and animals such as a dog, a snake and a scorpion assail it. Beside it appears a small grotesque figure with an enormous phallus, following a pattern already familiar in the Roman world. The message is clear even to those who do not know the context: the envious eye is wounded, bitten, poisoned and mocked.
The mosaic also bears a very short Greek inscription, KAI SY, meaning «you too». The formula, attested in other ancient contexts, is interpreted as a reply addressed to the envious: whatever harm you wish me, may it come back to you. It was therefore a protection that spoke to anyone crossing the threshold, with a wit able to combine warding off and irony, typical of Hellenistic and Roman taste.
Cups with eyes
Much earlier, in sixth-century BC Athens, potters decorated wine cups with large eyes painted on the outside. These are the so-called eye-cups, widespread above all in the second half of the century. One of the most famous is the cup by Exekias in Munich, with Dionysus on his ship inside and two enormous eyes on the exterior. When the drinker raised the cup, the eyes faced the other guests like a mask.
The meaning of these eyes is debated. Many scholars have seen in them an apotropaic function, a defence against the harmful gaze during the symposium; others prefer to read them as a visual game, a Dionysian mask or an echo of the eyes painted on the prows of ships. The different interpretations are not entirely mutually exclusive, and they remind us that in antiquity the eye was at once what threatens and what keeps watch.
The eyes of ships
The custom of painting eyes on the prows of boats is attested in Greek pottery and in other areas of the Mediterranean. The eyes symbolically allowed the ship to see its course and to keep dangers away. The habit has survived to this day in some harbours: in Malta, for example, the traditional fishing boats called luzzu still carry two painted eyes on the prow, which local tradition traces back to Phoenician seafarers.
The Antioch mosaic, the Attic cups and the painted prows show two opposite and complementary strategies. On the one hand, the enemy eye is depicted in order to destroy it symbolically; on the other, the dangerous gaze is met with another eye, watchful and protective. These are the same logics that, many centuries later, we will find again in the blue glass nazar and in the painted eyes of many folk traditions of the Mediterranean and the Near East.