[PDF]Painting In Rome And Pompei

PAINTING


IN

ROME AND POMPEII



T he few references to Roman painting in ancient literature usually
concern portable examples on materials such as wood and ivory. Be¬
cause these works have not survived, the Roman painters most highly praised
in antiquity have passed into obscurity. During the late Republic, portrait
painters like Iaia of Kyzikos (late 2nd—early 1st century b.c.) commanded
high prices, according to Pliny, higher even than “the most celebrated paint¬
ers of the same period, Sopolis and Dionysios.” So too we read in Pliny that
Arellius, who worked at the end of the first century b.c., was highly es¬
teemed and would have been more so but for his regrettable habit of por¬
traying goddesses in the image of his mistresses. The same author also tells
us that the emperor Augustus exhibited two paintings in his forum: the
Visage of War and Triumph . He displayed other paintings in the Forum of
Julius Caesar, his adoptive father, and it is clear that the medium was used
for propaganda and war reportage as well as for decoration.

The Roman paintings that have survived are in the durable medium of
fresco, used to adorn the interiors of private homes in the Roman cities and
in the countryside. According to Pliny, it was Studius “who first instituted
that most delightful technique of painting walls with representations of
villas, porticoes and landscape gardens, woods, groves, hills, pools, channels,


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2. Mount Vesuvius looms at the left behind
the ruins of Pompeii’s commercial center, the
Forum. From Amedeo Maiuri, Pompeii
(Rome, 1929), illus. p. 25.


rivers, coastlines.” Some have speculated that Studius was responsible for the
decoration of the Villa Farnesina, in Rome, probably completed in 19 b.c.
on the occasion of Agrippa’s marriage to Julia, daughter of the emperor
Augustus.

Despite a lack of physical evidence, we can assume that some portable
paintings depicted the same subjects that are found on painted walls in
Roman villas. It is even reasonable to suppose that Roman panel paintings,
which included both original creations and adaptations of renowned late
Greek works, were the prototypes for the most popular subjects in frescoes:
the Fall of Icarus, Polyphemus and Galatea, Perseus and Andromeda, and
the Death of Actaeon. It is probable that artists from Rome specializing in
fresco often traveled to other parts of Italy with copybooks that reproduced
popular paintings as well as ornamental patterns. The decorative elements
shared by certain villas in the capital and in the region of Naples make this
explanation all but certain.

The richest concentration of surviving frescoes has been found in
Campania, the region around Naples. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius on
August 24, a.d. 79, buried much of the countryside surrounding the vol¬
cano, including the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as dozens of


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private residences nearby. As so often happens in archaeology, a disaster
served to freeze a moment in the past—and allowed excavators from the
eighteenth century onward to delve into the life of the region’s ancient
inhabitants.

The many examples of fresco painting that have survived as a result of
the eruption of Vesuvius are nevertheless but a fraction of what existed in
the Roman world. Pompeii was not even among the thirty greatest cities of
the Roman Empire. Thus with each discovery in the Vesuvian region or in
Rome, scholars are forced to rethink issues related to chronology and style.

Because of two major acquisitions made early in this century, the Metro¬
politan Museum has the finest collection of Roman frescoes outside of Italy.
Sections of painted walls from villas of the first century b.c. in the Neapoli¬
tan suburbs of Boscoreale and Boscotrecase were purchased and exported
with the permission of the Italian government in 1903 and 1920 respec¬
tively. In the case of the second group of paintings, discovered in Boscotrecase
in 1903 and acquired in 1920, the sequence of events was fortunate indeed,
for had the paintings not been removed from their original context and
offered for sale, they might well have been lost forever during the 1906
eruption of Mount Vesuvius.


3. The villas of Boscoreale and Boscotrecase
were located north of Pompeii and were bur¬
ied during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in
a.d. 79.


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4. The entrance vestibule of the Samnite
House at Herculaneum displays typical deco¬
ration of the First Style of Roman wall paint¬
ing, with an upper zone crowned by a stucco
molding and painted central and lower zones
simulating colored-marble slabs.

5. An example of First Style painting, this
fragment (30.142.5) in the Metropolitan
Museum simulates marble. A comparable
fragment was recently excavated in Turkey at
the site of Priene, and both may date from the
early first century b.c.



The painted walls of Roman villas provide an unparalleled record of the
life and worldview of the well-to-do two millennia ago. They are not only
the physical remains of a site, but also mirrors of the Romans’ cultural
and artistic concerns. Frescoed walls in private Roman houses seem to have
been almost exclusively decorative, only rarely appearing to have served
a cultic or religious purpose.

It is a truism that the Romans were deeply indebted to the magnificent
legacy of Greek culture. Roman narrative paintings are often presumed to
copy works from the Greek Classical and Hellenistic periods, yet when they
include mythological themes popular in the Greek world, the paintings are
often casual and sentimentalized variations of earlier works. We must re¬
member that for Roman patrons, as for us, Greek art had a historical fascina¬
tion; Latin authors refer to the Greeks as the “ancients.” The gap between
the Greeks of the mid-fifth century b.c. and the Romans of the first century
b.c. was as great as that between the High Renaissance and the Beaux-Arts
period of the late nineteenth century.

Our knowledge of Roman and Pompeian villas of the first centuries b.c.
and a.d. has grown considerably in the last decade and a half through sys¬
tematic excavation and study. It has become clear that the decorative ele¬
ments of these private homes are more profitably considered in their
historical setting than as echoes of lost Hellenistic (late 4th—1st century
b.c.) masterpieces. The nineteenth-century fascination with great ancient
artists and shadowy cultural impulses has yielded to a more objective scholarly
method, which seeks to examine each period and place as a particular
milieu that drew to a greater or lesser extent from the past. It has become
possible to conceive of a Roman private setting in Roman terms—as a place
designed for first-century patrons who lived in rooms with elaborately dec¬
orated walls, ceilings, floors, and furnishings.

A development of Roman painting in four styles was discerned by Au¬
gust Mau in his seminal study of Roman painting of 1882. Although Mau’s
system is still basically sound, recent research has revealed frequent re¬
vivals of styles in later periods, leading to qualifications of the progression
described by Mau. The First Style (ca. 200—60 b.c.) was largely an explora¬
tion of the possibilities of simulating marble of various colors and types on
painted plaster. Artists of the late Republic (2nd-1st century b.c.) drew
upon examples of early Hellenistic (late 4th—3rd century b.c.) painting and
architecture in order to simulate masonry walls. The wall was routinely
divided into three horizontal painted zones, and the uppermost was crowned
by a stucco cornice of dentils, based upon the Doric architectural order
(fig. 4). In general the mosaic floors of this period were more ornate than the
walls, which lacked figural decoration.

The decline of the First Style coincided with the Roman colonization of
Pompeii in 80 b.c., which transformed what had essentially been an Italic
town with Greek influences into a Roman city. Going beyond the simple
representation of costlier building materials, artists borrowed from the fig¬
ural repertoire of Hellenistic Greek wall painting to depict gods, mortals,
and heroes in various contexts. The stern-faced marble portraits of the late
Republic might mislead one to imagine that it was a time of great austerity
in contrast to the splendor and opulence of the imperial age, but it was in
fact as socially variegated and populated by art collectors of extravagant
taste as that which followed.


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In the earliest phase of the Second Style, prior to the middle of the first
century b.c., the masonry wall of First Style painting endured, but columns
appeared to break through the picture plane in an imaginary foreground.
The next phase is found in both the Villa of the Mysteries near Pompeii
(ca. 60 b.c.; fig. 7) and the Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale (ca.
50-40 b.c.). The panels from Boscoreale, as we shall see, are an exceptional
example of late Second Style decoration, teasing the eye with perspectival
recession and providing copies of lost but presumably once-famous Hellenistic
paintings. In the architectural vistas, deeply receding colonnades and pro¬
jections of column bases into the viewer’s space became commonplace. Often
the wall was no longer acknowledged and simply embellished, as had been
the tendency in the First Style, but was instead painted in such a way as to
seem knee-high. We are encouraged to look above this socle, the only bar¬
rier before us, and out into fantastic panoramas or architectural confec¬
tions (see figs. 27, 28). The fact that the viewer’s eye was methodically
tricked on such a scale gives us insight into the nature and extent of aes¬
thetic refinement in the art of the late Roman Republic.

In the Second Style copies of earlier paintings, as in the Boscoreale paint¬
ings of Room H, the intention was to create a picture gallery, of the kind we
read about in ancient literature, that displayed elaborate reproductions of
famous Hellenistic works (fig.32). The combination of paintings in a gallery
was occasionally meaningful, as in the religious cycle of the Villa of the
Mysteries, and occasionally haphazard, as in Boscoreale’s Room H. At Bosco¬
reale, the connection among some paintings is no greater than we would
expect to find in a well-appointed residence of the nineteenth century; the
choice of subjects appears to have been based on the quality and renown of
the original pictures rather than some mysterious thread of meaning.

With the political transition from Julius Caesar’s rule to that of Emperor
Augustus (r. 27 b.c.— a.d. 14) in the second half of the first century b.c.,
sweeping artistic changes were introduced. When Octavian (later named


6. This room , painted with a variety of reli¬
gious and cultic scenes , gave the Villa of the
Mysteries , near Pompeii , its name. The large
figures are characteristic of the Second Style.

7. Bedroom B of the Villa of the Mysteries
gives an example of Second Style trompe Voeil
in its depiction of a round temple behind a
marble-faced wall and Corinthian columns.



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8,9. Below: The alcove of the Villa Farne-
sina in Rome, constructed for Agrippa and
decorated about 19 b.c., epitomizes the last
phase of the Second Style in the diminished
size of the central painting, which represents
the nymph Leucothea cradling the infant
Dionysos. From Museo Nazionale Romano:
Le Pitture (Rome, 1982), pi. 62. Center: In
a Third Style wall of the dining room of the
probably Augustan period Casa dei Cubicoli
Floreali at Pompeii, the painting of Odysseus
at the left has become simply one component
of the whole decorative scheme. The dining
room seems to depend closely on Bedroom 15
of the imperial villa at Boscotrecase.


Augustus) defeated Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 b.c., there
followed a trend toward opulence in public monuments, epitomized by
Augustus’s declaration that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it
a city of marble. During much of the Republic, elaboration was eschewed in
public buildings, but in the early Empire, a change in political climate en¬
couraged both public and private celebration of what was uniquely Roman
in art rather than purely Greek-inspired artistic traditions.

Under Augustus, a new impulse to innovate, rather than re-create, as¬
serted itself in architecture, portraiture, and other arts as well. Augustus
oversaw the development of a new architectural order, the Composite Order,
which mixed classical forms with Roman innovations and was first apparent
in the Forum of Augustus in Rome (19 b.c.). His approach to official por¬
traiture, which quickly influenced private portraiture, is exemplified by his
statue from Prima Porta (ca. 20—17 b.c.; Museo Chiaramonti, The Vatican
Museums). This magnificent work fuses fifth-century classicism and Hellen¬
istic idealism, and suggests by the calm visage of the emperor, clad in the
armor of a victorious general but barefoot like a deity, the security and
prosperity that his reign would guarantee.

During the Third Style (ca. 20 b.c.—a.d. 20), coincident with Augustus’s
reign, the subject matter and style of fresco painting also changed abruptly.
The introduction of this new style may in part be attributed to Augustus
and Agrippa, his close friend and a patron of the arts, who sponsored many



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public buildings, such as the Pantheon in Rome. In fact, Agrippa’s own villa
in Rome, the Villa Farnesina (ca. 19 b.c.; fig. 8), anticipated the Third Style.

During this new phase of mural decoration, walls often had a single mono¬
chrome background color—such as red, black, or white—and were decor¬
ated with elaborate architectural, vegetal, and figural details. These drew
upon familiar forms, including mythical beasts like sirens and griffins, but
the original mythological symbolism of such animals seems to have been of
practically no interest to the artists, who treated them as decorative devices.
In decorative arts, the same basic indifference to subject matter was charac¬
teristic of the so-called Neo-Attic movement, which began to serve the Roman
appetite for classicizing style as early as the late second century b.c. and was
especially popular during the Augustan period.

Additional evidence of this primarily decorative, rather than symbolic,
approach to wall painting is the fact that the multiplicity of figural scenes
characteristic of the Second Style ended, and only a few stock scenes were
used. These usually appeared in the center of the wall. As in the Second
Style, they may be understood to serve as the equivalent of framed paint¬
ings, in which figures and landscapes were shown in fairly natural spatial
perspective. These later paintings lose the importance they had earlier en¬
joyed, however, and are only a part, not the dominant element, in the over¬
all decorative scheme. The paintings’ subjects, which during the Second
Style had begun to matter less than the fame of the works copied, became


10. The paintings of the Third Style Villa
Imperiale at Pompeii (ca. 12 b.c.) show care¬
ful attention to detail and have much in com¬
mon with those from Boscotrecase. Here an
incense burner rises in front of a delicately
described frieze and fantastic architecturalfea¬
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