Scala/Art Resource, NY

A wounded hunter sits atop his horse, his eyes covered and his body contorted, in one of the villa’s most poignant mosaics. The thematic range of scenes shown in the mosaics—from ecstasy to agony, from whimsy to tragedy—makes them a kind of microcosm of the Roman world, which was already in decline in the fourth century A.D. The Villa Romana’s mosaics seem to be a tribute to the vast reaches of that empire.