The Un Swept Floor Mosaic

The mosaic was found in 1833 during construction work in the vineyard of achille lupi near the bastione di sangallo porta ardeatina see a rome art.

The un swept floor mosaic.

As described by pliny it is a floor mosaic which depicted the leftovers of a meal on a floor. Pliny mentions this trompe l oeil optical illusion in his natural history xxxvi 184. The word is greek but it was a common roman genre in which the floor of the triclinium or dining room would be decorated with food scraps seemingly cast onto the ground from the very dining tables at which guests would be seated. This depicts the floor of a room covered with the remains of a feast including fish fruit and other fragments of food.

In many respects this table top made by arianna gallo of koko mosaico is an unrelated trompe d oeil of ordinary stuff accumulated on a coffee table. 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. It s a wonderfully whimsical design of the debris from a roman feast strewn carelessly over a dining room floor.

The unswept floor a mosaic sosus unswept floor one of the few mosaics master we do know the name of is sosus of pergamos famous for his work the unswept floor which inspired later copies. For a long time i have been wanting to make my own version of the famous ancient un swept floor mosaic motif. Asaroton or asarotos oikos unswept room is a great term i discovered regarding ancient roman and hellenistic mosaic work. 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. There is a even a specific greek term for this asaroton. The unswept floor mosaic can assume almost any guise and pop up in an almost infinite variety of modern versions but it still remains firmly attached to its ancient roots. Sosos laid at pergamon what is called the asarotos oikos or unswept room because on the pavement was represented.

The unswept floor copy of the mosaic done by sosus. The unswept floor that was shown in the photograph on wikimedia commons is actually a small part of a much larger mosaic as this tiny picture of the surviving portion of the mosaic illustrates. The other mosaic for which sosus is and then was very admired was doves drinking from a bowl below. Details of koko mosaico.

The idea is to give the appearance of real objects littering a floor as a kind of trompe l oeil effect. Unswept floor mosaic in canterbury. Inspiration for the un swept floor mosaic.