Roman Villa Triclinium

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Archaeologists today use mosaic design to easily identify triclinia because of their unique design and specific layout for accommodating the couches.9 If a mosaic needs to have a specific and unique design to be functional for its audience, such as dinner guests who would have been reclining in their couches, the mosaic must have been situated in a room that would have rendered these accommodations necessary for the function of the piece. This is why historians can identify the triclinium of a Roman villa through analysis of the design of a mosaic. The typical three-couch layout of a triclinium would be reflected in the design of the floor mosaic as a means to best portray the intentions of both the commissioner and the artist themselves.10 While this is a technique that allows us to determine what room would have definitely been a triclinium, it does not account for the other rooms in the villa that also could have been used as dining rooms.11 The Younger Pliny had a room in his Laurentian villa that could have been converted from a large bedroom to a moderately sized dining-room, and back again.12 This, however, does not reflect the fact that this mosaic was specifically designed to accommodate a room of people that would have been facing different angles, and would therefore examine the floor differently, depending on their positioning. This mosaic would have definitely been used for a triclinium floor because of the obvious choices that the commissioner and the artist made in their efforts to make the scene as visible as …show more content…
It is unlikely that the mosaic would have covered the entire floor of the triclinium because the couches would have covered the floors on the three sides that it boxes in.13 For the mosaic to have been properly seen, it would have needed to have started after the couches so that the diners could see and ingest the entire
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