Cosmati pavement pattern generator

The inlaid stone floors of medieval Italy. Choose the size of the discs, how many rings of triangles and dots surround them, and whether the field around them is made of diamonds or squares, and export a seamless Cosmati pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Dark red discs ringed with green triangles among gold and cream diamonds in a Cosmati pavement pattern

Floors cut from stone

Opus sectile, Latin for cut work, is a way of making pictures and patterns by fitting pieces of stone cut to shape. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century Rome, families of marble workers known as the Cosmati made floors in this manner for churches, and the same style reached as far as Westminster Abbey in London, where a pavement was laid in 1268.

A typical Cosmati floor sets large discs of dark red or green stone into a field of small marble pieces. The classic arrangement is the quincunx: one large disc with four smaller ones around it, each framed by bands of triangles, dots and twisting ribbons.

How the generator builds them

Ornamatic puts a large disc in the middle of the cell and a small disc at each corner. Around each disc it lays a ring of triangles pointing outward, and then a ring of small dots, and cuts a thin line inside the disc, like the inlaid lines of the originals. The space around each disc is cleared of tesserae, which leaves a pale halo.

The field between the discs can be made of diamonds or of squares in a checkerboard. The cell is a square, so the pattern repeats exactly. The twisting ribbons of the originals are not drawn.