The Un Swept Floor Mosaic

Doves drinking from a bowl.

The un swept floor mosaic. 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. 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. Asaroton or asarotos oikos unswept room is a great term i discovered regarding ancient roman and hellenistic mosaic work.

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. For a long time i have been wanting to make my own version of the famous ancient un swept floor mosaic motif. Unswept floor mosaic in canterbury. Inspiration for the un swept floor mosaic.

The idea is to give the appearance of real objects littering a floor as a kind of trompe l oeil effect. 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 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.

The unswept floor is a theme from classical mosaics such as one to be found in the vatican. This was said to represent the floor of a dining room after a banquet. The unswept floor copy of the mosaic done by sosus. A mosaic from hadrian s villa now in the capitoline museums depicts a group of doves on a round bowl.

This is a video showing the unswept floor mosaic on exhibit at the vatican museum. 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. The unswept floor is a now lost mosaic by the 2nd century bc mosaicist sosus of pergamon. There is a even a specific greek term for this asaroton.

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. 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. It s a wonderfully whimsical design of the debris from a roman feast strewn carelessly over a dining room floor.