Unswept Floor Mosaic

Doves drinking from a bowl.

Unswept floor mosaic. It takes the conventional mosaic floor and turns it into something provocative and self referential. 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. There is a even a specific greek term for this asaroton.

The date of the mosaic fluctuates between the 3rd century bc and late 4th century very soon after the battles would have taken place. The unswept floor copy of the mosaic done by sosus the other mosaic for which sosus is and then was very admired was doves drinking from a bowl below. Secondly because it s an original and strikingly modern. By sosos of pergamon and here by the.

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. 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 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.

As described by pliny it is a floor mosaic which depicted the leftovers of a meal on a floor. Sosos laid at pergamon what is called the asarotos oikos or unswept room because on the pavement was represented. 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 decorative theme is that known as asàrotos òikos or the unswept floor created in the second century b c. The mosaic measures 5 82 by 3 13. The unswept floor is a theme from classical mosaics such as one to be found in the vatican. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration and were particularly popular in the ancient roman world.

Mosaic today includes not just murals and pavements but also artwork hobby crafts and industrial and construction. 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 alexander mosaic dating from circa 100 bc is a roman floor mosaic originally from the house of the faun in pompeii that is allegedly an imitation of apelles painting. 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.

For the assignment i first went looking for good images of the unswept floor on the internet and among many here is the slow loading vatian museum original. A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone glass or ceramic held in place by plaster mortar and covering a surface.