Decorative floor or wall mosaics in ancient Roman art that depicted scattered items like food, bones, or debris, often rendered in incredibly realistic detail.
From Greek 'asarotos' meaning 'unswept,' because these mosaics depicted unswept floors and scattered refuse—the word literally means what it pictures.
Roman artists created 'unswept floor' mosaics as jokes showing leftover dinner scraps so realistically that visitors would bend down to sweep them away—it was the ancient world's version of visual trickery!
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