The Un Swept Floor Mosaic

Sosos laid at pergamon what is called the asarotos oikos or unswept room because on the pavement was represented.

The un swept floor mosaic.

There is a even a specific greek term for this asaroton. It s a wonderfully whimsical design of the debris from a roman feast strewn carelessly over a dining room floor. 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. This was said to represent the floor of a dining room after a banquet.

Details of koko mosaico. As described by pliny it is a floor mosaic which depicted the leftovers of a meal on a floor. Unswept floor mosaic in canterbury. 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.

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. This depicts the floor of a room covered with the remains of a feast including fish fruit and other fragments of food. Pliny mentions this trompe l oeil optical illusion in his natural history xxxvi 184. This is a video showing the unswept floor mosaic on exhibit at the vatican museum.

The unswept floor is a now lost mosaic by the 2nd century bc mosaicist sosus of pergamon. A mosaic from hadrian s villa now in the capitoline museums depicts a group of doves on a round bowl. The unswept floor is a theme from classical mosaics such as one to be found in the vatican. 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.

Doves drinking from a bowl. For a long time i have been wanting to make my own version of the famous ancient un swept floor mosaic motif. 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. 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 other mosaic for which sosus is and then was very admired was doves drinking from a bowl below. 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. Asaroton or asarotos oikos unswept room is a great term i discovered regarding ancient roman and hellenistic mosaic work.