Roman Floor Mosaics

Detail of a corner panel from mosaic floor with a bear hunt a d.

Roman floor mosaics.

Rich romans decorated the floors of their main rooms with mosaics. Many mosaics captured scenes of history and everyday roman life. Design perfectly preserved ancient roman mosaic floor discovered in italy. Mosaic today includes not just murals and pavements but also artwork hobby crafts and industrial and construction.

A roman mosaic is a mosaic made during the roman period throughout the roman republic and later empire mosaics were used in a variety of private and public buildings. Roman monochrome floor mosaic 3rd century ad. 300 400 roman from near baiae italy. 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.

Stone tesserae 51 68 1 2 34 1 2 58 in. Mosaics were commonly used for floor and wall decoration in the ancient roman world and were made from small cubes of stone or glass enamel of varying colors known as tesserae. Roman bacchus floor mosaic by mark cartwright cc by nc sa as mosaics evolved in the 2nd century bce smaller and more precisely cut tesserae were used sometimes as small as 4 mm or less and designs employed a wide spectrum of colours with coloured grouting to match surrounding tesserae. A remarkably well preserved mosaic floor has been discovered by archaeologists beneath a vineyard in northern italy.

These were stuck to the floor with mortar a type of cement. Mosaics offer a vivid picture of ancient roman life. Archaeologists were astonished by the find as it came almost a century after the. A perfectly preserved ancient roman mosaic floor has been discovered near the northern italian city of verona.

Scala art resource new york the expressionist roman style which flourished in italy penetrated into the former greek cities in the eastern part of the empire but polychromy and types of composition based on the framed picture persisted with especial tenacity due to strong local hellenistic. They were highly influenced by earlier and contemporary hellenistic greek mosaics and often included famous figures from history and mythology such as alexander the great in the alexander mosaic. Take a look at ancient roman mosaics bbc. Each mosaic used thousands of pieces to make a pattern.

Mosaic floors were a statement of wealth and importance.