North African bath mosaic
Type:
Mosaics,
Secular architecture
Date:
ca. 400
Location or Findspot (Modern-Day Country):
Tunisia
Medium:
Stone
Dimensions:
180 × 295 cm
Description:
A Byzantine woman is shown grooming herself in this floor mosaic, originally located in a changing room (apodyterium) of a bath in a late Roman villa at Sidi Ghrib. The luxurious, multiroom bath (a square measuring approx. 25 m per side) is nearly as large as the rest of the villa, which indicates its importance to the homeowner.
The bejeweled woman, doubtless the wife of the villa's proprietor, admires herself in a mirror held by one of two enslaved women. She is surrounded by costly toiletry items—a clothes chest, washbasin, bucket, a casket for perfumes, all of gold or silver—and a pair of sandals. In a second changing room, the woman's husband was shown seated as an enslaved man carries firewood to heat the baths. These mosaics displayed the family's wealth and reified their social status, which their descendants may have enjoyed until the villa was destroyed by fire around 525.
The mosaic is now in the Bardo National Museum, Tunis.
The bejeweled woman, doubtless the wife of the villa's proprietor, admires herself in a mirror held by one of two enslaved women. She is surrounded by costly toiletry items—a clothes chest, washbasin, bucket, a casket for perfumes, all of gold or silver—and a pair of sandals. In a second changing room, the woman's husband was shown seated as an enslaved man carries firewood to heat the baths. These mosaics displayed the family's wealth and reified their social status, which their descendants may have enjoyed until the villa was destroyed by fire around 525.
The mosaic is now in the Bardo National Museum, Tunis.
Relevant Textbook Chapter(s):
2
Image Credits:
Wikimedia Commons
