Roman Unswept Floor Mosaic

A detail of the unswept floor mosaic at the vatican museum.

Roman unswept floor mosaic.

One can imagine the high degree of workmanship this required to demonstrate in tesserae the metal the feathers and the water in this exquisite mosaic. Doves drinking from a bowl. The brighon mosaic with its cherry stems is of course a direct reference to the asaraton or unswept floor motif from roman times. Roman mosaics often copied earlier coloured ones however the romans did develop their own styles and production schools were developed across the empire which cultivated their own particular preferences large scale hunting scenes and attempts at perspective in the african provinces impressionistic vegetation and a foreground observer in the mosaics of antioch or the european preference.

A mosaic of the debris of a roman feast. The original is a simple but brilliant idea. The mosaic implies a feast so lavish that if it were actually served it might have been illegal a violation of roman sumptuary laws which capped how much a host could spend on any one banquet. Two of his famous mosaics include the unswept floor and doves drinking from a bowl.

In a previous post about ancient roman dining habits tossing bones shells and scraps on the floor and shared a mosaic that records this practice in exquisite detail. The unswept floor copy of the mosaic done by sosus. Pliny mentions this trompe l oeil optical illusion in his natural history xxxvi 184. This depicts the floor of a room covered with the remains of a feast including fish fruit and other fragments of food.

The other mosaic for which sosus is and then was very admired was doves drinking from a bowl below. The unswept floor is a now lost mosaic by the 2nd century bc mosaicist sosus of pergamon. This is a video showing the unswept floor mosaic on exhibit at the vatican museum. The discovery of an ancient roman mosaic duration.

The met 109 712 views. The latter was discovered in 1737 during an excavation of hadrian s villa in tivoli italy. Sosos laid at pergamon what is called the asarotos oikos or unswept room because on the pavement was represented. There is a even a specific greek term for this asaroton.

First what do we know about the mosaic. At the time there were two things bothering me. The unswept floor is a theme from classical mosaics such as one to be found in the vatican. The idea is to give the appearance of real objects littering a floor as a kind of trompe l oeil effect.