I sandali come codice visivo: significati e contesti narrativi nei mosaici pavimentali di età tardoantica

Abstract

This article examines how sandals function as a visual code in Roman and Late Antique floor mosaics, rather than as simple dress accessories. From the 1st–2nd centuries CE they appear in funerary contexts, especially on female stelae, where they help construct gendered identity, status and family memory alongside other objects of the mundus muliebris. From the 2nd–3rd centuries onwards, pairs of sandals become a recurring motif in bath and domestic pavements across the Mediterranean, often combined with strigils, vessels and short inscriptions. These images both mark routes within thermal complexes and visually echo idiomatic good wishes for a “good bath”, well documented in written sources. In Late Antique ecclesiastical settings, the motif is further re-semanticized in light of biblical traditions that link the removal of footwear to access to holy ground. Overall, sandals emerge as a flexible and widely shared iconographic sign, capable of expressing norms of bodily practice, social hierarchy, ritual movement and the perception of the sacred in Late Antique visual culture.