Back to Art H. 280 table of contents
The History of Art Survey
Lecture 12
The Art of Republican Roman
Gardner 244-264
A Historiography:
B History
C Art History
Historical Period: Roman Republic 509-27 BC
Art of the Roman Republic 1st c BC
7-
1 Temple of “Fortuna Virilis” (Portunus) Rome
2 Temple of “the Sibyl” or “Vesta” Tivoli
3 Temple of Fortuna Primigenia (reconstruction) Palestrina
4 Funerary relief with portraits of Gessii, Rome
5 Relief with funerary procession from Amiterrnum Amiternum
6 Head of a Roman patrician Otricoli
7 Portrait of a Roman General Tivoli
8 Denarius with a portrait of Julius Caesar
9 Forum, Pompeii (aerial) Pompeii
10 Forum, Pompeii (plan)
* a view of the Forum’s space
11 Amphitheater Pompeii
Roman vaulting systems
12 Brawl in the Pompeii amphitheater, House I,3,23 Pompeii
Reconstruction of a typical Pompeiian house
13 Atrium of the House of the Vettii Pompeii
* House of the Faun Pompeii
14 First Style wall painting, Samnite House Herculaneum
* 15 Dionysiac mystery frieze, 2nd Style, Villa of Mysteries Pompeii
16 Second style, Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor Boscoreale
17 Gardenscape, Villa of Livia Primaporta
18 Third style, Villa of Argippa Postumus Boscotrecase
19 Old farmer of Corycus, Vatican Vergil
20 Fourth style, Domus Aurea of Nero Rome
21 Fourth style wall painting, Ixion Rm, House of the Vettii Pompeii
22 Neptune and Amphitrite, House of Neptune and Amphitrite Herculaneum
23 Portrait of a husband and wife, House VII,2,6 Pompeii
24 Still life with peaches Herculaneum
Historiography
When we see that the Roman Republic runs from 509-27 BCE, we realize that monarchy
wasn’t the only form of social rule in the ancient world. Rome was managed
by an oligarchy. Here, like Athens, a relatively small number of citizens ruled
by a sort of democratic decision making. Indeed the economy as a whole was supported
by slave agriculture and crafts as well as commercial trade around the Mediterranean.
Where do nations come from? In the ancient world nations are seen naturalistically,
as organic communities. The Romans were seen as the people of Rome this village
on the Tiber river, ruled (controlled? taxed?) at some point by people speaking
another language and massed a bit to the north, who were called Etruscans. As
their own story goes the Romans had their own kings from Romulus who founded
their unity in 753 BCE until 509 BCE, when they became a Republic with the expulsion
of the Etruscans. They remained an oligarchically ruled Republic as they grew
in power over the four centuries during which they rose to conquer their former
rulers, and eventually the rest of the Italian peninsula ( ), and at more or
less the same time a large portion of the adjoining world surrounding the Mediterranean
Sea on all sides. That greater region of conquest and Roman rule was the Roman
Empire, which extended over a vast number of other peoples, who lived in a great
variety of languages and regions, from the Britons, Gauls and Germans to their
north to the Greeks, Syrians and Egyptians to their east, north Africans on
their south, and Spaniards to the west.
We don’t see Roman art as distinguishable from the art of the Etruscans
and other Italians and Mediterranean peoples until the first century BCE. That
is, what we do see of visual imagery of the region of Rome and the regions it
governs is better understood socially from the perspective of the more powerful
and developed Etruscans, or in the third and second centuries from the perspective
of the wider Mediterranean world as the local version of what we have been calling
the International Hellenistic.
Our hegemonic history totalized this as: “Of all the ancient civilizations,
only the Roman approximates today’s world in its multicultural character.
Indeed, the Roman world is the bridge—in politics, the arts, and religion—between
the ancient and the medieval and modern Western worlds.” (246)
There were other large empires, conglomerations of nations ruled by one great metropolitan center, before and at the same time. Our text has already considered the art of the Persians, the Hellenistic Greeks—upon whom the Romans modeled so much of their own culture, each of which was arguably as multicultural. It has also mentioned the Mauryan Indians and the Qin and Han Chinese which also spread over many different cultural regions. What the vision offered here proposes to focus upon is a multicultural civilization: not just a region of political and economic rule, but a region of shared culture. Each of the civilizational groups I have listed achieves this. But the Romans remain special for our text.
What may be more interesting is the reference point of “today’s world.” This isn’t a particular empire, but what?
The Roman world is further noted as “the bridge” between the ancient, medieval and modern “Western worlds.”
The hegemonic view is, like all views, a perspective. A view looking outward from one place. In this case the location of the hegemonic viewer seems to be the Anglo western European world of the United States and Britain and their closest political, economic and cultural allies, the French, Germans, Dutch, Italians and Spanish. They are the “West” and they are the current rulers of the world we live in, or “today’s world.”
All world history has not been a project creating this particular reality. There are any number of multicultural collaborations of culture around the world, such as those of Eastern Asia, or Northeast Asia, or South Asia, or Central Asia, all of which overlap in different ways. Or there are the multicultural unities of Latin America, or East Africa, or West Africa, or North Africa, or the Arabic world, or the Islamic world, all of which overlap in different ways. Or there are the alternative “Wests” of Europe as a whole including or not including Russia, or even the Eastern Europe or Central Europe left out of the “West” as our hegemonic viewpoint takes it.
Each of these macro regions shares multiple cultures, but the point of our volume, and the point of the hegemonic view of the English speaking civilization of the world in the 20th to 21st century is the specific combination of cultures who speak French, German, Italian and Spanish as they are gathered around those who speak English in the world today. And these peoples, trace their cultural unity back through the European Renaissance during which they were stabilized out of Christian western Europe and back to Western Roman Empire.
Our history is not a record of the world as it as so multifariously developed in all these regions, but an interpretation of how modern Anglo American English culture has developed out of the European heritage of Christian and earlier Roman culture. We aren’t being asked to look back to see what happened in general or at random, but specifically as it contributed to our view of ourselves. That is, as it looks to those to whom the book is directed: the English reading public and the elite who govern them.
Is Professor Tartakov overly concerned about what he perceives as an unfortunate bias that pits us (the U.S. that is) against the rest of the world in different guises depending on the times? The U.S. “West” versus the “East” has been NATO vs. the Soviet Union in the Cold War and it is now a wider European Christendom vs. the Islamic world today, with suggestions from political scientists that the conflict of civilizations will move soon, or at the same time, to a “West” vs. Japan.
As the world’s superpower (US terminology) or hyperpower (French terminology), we have to consider the possibility, because so much of not only economic and political importance, but so many future wars lie in the future.History
Surprisingly extensive remains of Roman art remain throughout the regions they once ruled. Many were reused by later cultures and some continue to be used today. This is a testament to the strength of the structures involved. The Romans are well remembered and respected as engineers. Though when your book says some aqueducts are still in use, you shouldn’t fear that the lead they thus put into their systems is still flowing. Only the outer structures are still as the Romans constructed them.
Even where there are no remains there are art collections with examples and “modern versions of famous Roman buildings.” “Roman civilization lives on in the Western world in concepts of law and government, in languages, in calendars, even in the coins used daily. Indeed, Roman art speaks to contemporary Western viewers in a language almost everyone can readily understand. Its diversity and eclecticism foreshadowed the modern world.” (246) “
As I mentioned in our discussion of Egypt, later Classicizing art extended the style of the Mediterranean antique right down to the middle of the 20th century. What this attempt to emphasize the Romans special historical importance for later cultures in the Anglo-European world is the important role played by the rest of the world. If the Romans were of more direct importance than the Chinese or the Indians and others, they were this largely because they were the middle men conveying the benefits of those other cultures to us.
Much of what the Romans have left, as we shall see, was what they inherited from Mediterranean culture in general. For instance the classical orders of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Much more includes what the Romans, as conquerors of so much of the world around them, brought us from that world. Take as an examples the Christianity of the eastern Mediterranean Levant, which they tried for three centuries to suppress.
Rome rose to conquer a vast collection of cultural regions surrounding their own, and held it together through military might, efficient government and trade, with over 50,000 miles of routes for maritime trade alone, and many more of well maintained overland routes as well. Rome itself became one of the most impressive cities ever developed. And it remains that today.
Style Periods: Roman Republic 509-27 BCE
Art of the Roman Republic 1st c BCE
The earliest art of Rome, was what we have seen as Etruscan. Republican Rome
was ruled a senate (a council of elders) and two elected consuls.
On occasions one individual was appointed dictator for a limited period.
All these leaders originally came from the wealthy landowners (patricians),
but later smaller landholders and merchants (plebeians) were also represented.
In 211 BCE the Roman general Marcellus brought as spoils of war some of the
visual imagery of the defeated Greek colony of Syracuse, along with the usual
collection of arms, armor, gold and slaves. This was the beginning of the “craze
for works of Greek art” (Livey). According to Plutarch, this was the beginning
of the shift of Roman culture from “fighting and farming” to an
interest in the fine arts. This interest increased with the Roman conquest of
Greece in 146 BCE, and most of the Hellenistic world in the subsequent period.
“The Etruscan basis of Roman art and architecture was never forgotten,
and the statues and buildings of the Roman Republic are highly eclectic, drawing
on both Greek and Etruscan traditions. The resultant mix, however, is distinctly
Roman.” (247)
We should remember that the Etruscans had long cultivated an interest in the finest art from around the Mediterranean, both as models and as fine possessions for their tombs and temples. The less imperial way to state this same case would be to say that as they rose to political and economic prominence through the expansion of their empire, the Romans created their own blend of Mediterranean culture drawing on the Hellenistic cultures that preceded it and collating the cultures of all the regions it proceeded to incorporate within its realm. As we will see, much of what we call Roman art could also be called the local art of Alexandria (Egypt), Syria, Gaul, and so on.
Though our book takes no interest in it, we should note that historical economists emphasize the major presence of slavery in the Roman economy, many simply calling it a slave economy. Our book points out that 25% of the population of the Peninsula was enslaved.
1 Temple of “Fortuna Virilis” (Portunus), c 75 BCE, Rome
The Temple of Portunus, the Roman god of harbors, survives within the center
of modern Rome. We recognize a variation on the Greek and Etruscan forms that
preceded it, in a uniquely Roman combination. In the Etruscan manner,
it is raised on a podium with stairs on one side, with a porch of free standing
columns for two bays in the front, and a walled-sanctuary for four bays at the
rear. In a variation of the Greek manner, it is surrounded by [Roman versions
of] the Ionic order, with engaged columns continuing the Ionic around the sanctuary,
unlike the Etruscan plan. The result is called a pseudoperipteral temple.
It was originally finished in white plaster, that would have resembled the marble
structures of the eastern Mediterranean.
2 Temple of “the Sibyl” or “Vesta,” early 1st
c BCE, Tivoli
Here is a Roman version of a tholos, round, temple, a form never employed by
the Etruscans, but found elsewhere in the Hellenistic world. The order here
is the [Roman] Corinthian. A unique and peculiarly Roman variation seen here
is the use of concrete construction.
The Romans invention of concrete was a major engineering development that enabled
them to create structures of size and form known nowhere else in the world before,
[and indeed lost with their interest in it during the middle ages].
Concrete is a changing mixture of lime mortar, volcanic sand, water and small
stones. It was thus a material mixed in a plastic, liquid form and left to set
within wooden forms, where it was often finished with stone, brick or stucco
facing (revetments). The result was not only cheaper than stone, it was much
more flexible and possessed structural qualities unavailable in stone. The most
important of these was its use in constructing large arches, vaults and domes,
unimaginable, and indeed impossible in stone.
One result of this new material was the Roman’s development of a revolutionary
aesthetic architecture based on sculptural masses in space, that was quite different
than anything that preceded it.
3 Temple of Fortuna Primigenia (reconstruction) Palestrina
late 2nd century BCE
The reconstruction here shows the elaborate temple covering several stories
and a quite vast space at Palestrina. It includes a variety of terraces and
colonnades and vaults. Where the those before them built separate structures
along a site, the Romans in many cases such as this completely enclosed an entire
site within a controlled plan.
4 Funerary relief w/ portraits of Gessii, 2’ high, c 30 BCE,
Rome
One of the characteristic marks of the Roman esthetic tradition is their interest
in precise personal portraits by which to remember their ancestors. These images
were carefully preserved and displayed by the great patrician families as proof
of their lineage’s prestige and age. Slaves and former slaves were not
permitted to maintain portable portraits, because their ancestors were not owners
of property. But they could, as in this case have them carved on their tombs.
And for this reason we have images of common Romans and not just their elite
surviving.
The three Gessii recorded here include Gessia Fusta (on the left), Gessius Primus
(on the right), the freed slaves of Publius Gessius (in the center). Publius
is shown in a general’s cuirass (breastplate) and realistic fashion.
The freed slaves are in a slightly less veristic style. All three are “sternly”
frontal, bust portraits. The slaves bear the name of their former owner. The
inscription records the work was paid for by Primus and directed by Fausta.
5 Relief with funerary procession from Amiterrnum, 1st c BCE, 2’
2”
Here is a rarer example of a narrative imagery on a tomb sculpture. It shows
the funerary procession, with a cortege in honor of the deceased, including
musicians, professional female mourners and the deceased’s wife and children.
One may compare the optical realism here with the same subject on the Geometric
Krator from the Dipylon cemetery (5-1) . The deceased here props himself up
like the Etruscan sarcophagus imagery of 9-4 and 9-14.
In this narrative style all the figures are given explicit ground lines to stand
upon. The stacking of these is unlike the standard perspective in patrician
art. Overlapping is avoided, but realism is thus lost. Our text associates the
style with “pre-classical art.” [Thus adopting the less imperial,
more democratic approach of seeing Mediterranean art as one.] The distinction
seems therefore to be one of class origins of the art. Plebeans weren’t
allowed the same style, or didn’t feel required to follow the style of
the Patricians.
6 Head of a Roman patrician, c 75-50 BCE, 1’ 2” Otricoli
The style of the Patrician portrait derives in part from Hellenistic,
Etruscan and Ptolemaic Egyptian models. [Or as I have maintained, Mediterranean
culture.] What is uniquely Roman in them is their emphasis on strict, warts-and-all
optical realism, (also referred to as veristic). This
is strikingly different than the idealizations of the Greek preference, such
as the Pericles (10-6). Patrician portraits are nearly all of men. Here we see
every wrinkle and fold of skin, including scars and age marks. It is a specificity
from which we could identify the man in the market place were we to meet him,
unlike the idealized pieces we are used to in earlier Greek art, but quite in
line with the development of optical realism in Hellenistic art of this time.
It also fits what many have called the essential materialism of Roman
art.
This was not a head from a full figure but a bust portrait:
shoulders and neck up. It was kept in a cupboard in remembrance and taken out
for viewing. The bust form was a Roman fashion; the Greeks felt a portrait should
include the entire body. Though as in 5-39, the herm of Pericles, busts
were known.
7 Portrait of a Roman General Tivoli
Here is an example of the somewhat incongruous melding of the two fashions:
a veristic Roman Patrician portrait joined to an idealized body. The head is
of an older man, the body of a younger one. Indeed the body type comes from
a heroic nude and approaches nudity, though drapery is brought in for modesty
(?). The figures rank is established by the military cuirass and body armor
he leans upon. Once again we see the eclectic melding of the [shared Mediterranean]
and the specifically Roman.
8 Denarius with a portrait of Julius Caesar, 44 BCE, 3/4” diam.
In the first century Romans began to place portraits of illustrious ancestors
on their coins, in place of the previous tradition, also followed by the Greeks,
of placing deities on coins.
The first Roman ruler to “dare” to place his own likeness on a coin
was Julius Caesar, “shortly before his assassination in 44 BCE. The inscription
reads dictator perpetuus (dictator for life). The piece, a silver coin,
records the Republican style image of the man as he was, looking the 56 years
of his actual age, with a receding hairline and creased face. This broke earlier
tradition, but began a new one. Coins were now to be used as propaganda for
the rulers in a more personal way than before.
It may not be out of place here to note that other cultures, such as the Kuashans of Central Asia and India, whom the Romans knew of, mixed their coin imagery, with rulers on one side and deities on the other, with just these propagandistic interests in mind. The idea was to bind the political region together with the identity of the ruler and the state.
9 Forum, Pompeii (aerial) 2nd c. BCE and later
10 Forum, Pompeii (plan) and * (view)
Pompeii, on the southern edge of modern Naples, survives as a remarkable archaeological
ruin, because of the fortuitous accident of being buried under layers of volcanic
ash that preserved a great deal with relatively little structural damage, and
being described by contemporary authors in texts that have survived. It was
buried, with its sister city Herculaneum, on August 24th, 79 CE.
As with my usage of the more progressively adopted BCE in place of BC, the Christian AD, Ano Domini or Year of our Lord, will be replaced in this course by the more universal CE, for Common Era, which it now certainly is.
Our texts lists former cultures (language communities) on the site, the Oscans
and the Samnites. Roman Pompeii was commenced officially in 80 BCE, by Sulla,
as a Latin language city. Its population grew to 10-20,000 people before the
earth quake of 62 CE and the obliteration of the site by the eruption of Vesuvius
in 79 CE.
The site preserves much of its original form, most visibly on the plan and aerial
view is its rectilinear grid layout. But what is amazing and fascinating here
is the survival of entire buildings right up to their roofs in many cases, and
including paintings on interior walls and decorative sculpture. The original
pavement of the streets is still functioning. Archaeologists even found petrified
remains of some of those inhabitants who were not lucky enough to escape the
deluge of ash.
The forum is the center of civic life, a public square. Usually [on
the model of the Roman army camp] it is located near the center of the town
at the intersection of major cross streets (the north-south cardo and the east
west decumanus). The forum itself is closed to all but pedestrian traffic.
Pompeii’s forum is in the southwest corner of the town, as it later expanded.
At the north end of the forum is the former Temple of Jupiter, that the Romans
converted into a Capitolium: a triple shrine of their chief gods, Jupiter,
Juno and Minerva. Unlike the isolated locations of Greek temples, Roman temples
stood at the heart of city activity among other structures, in the midst of
the market place and the assembly.
The Basilica (3 on the plan) housed the civil law court, and
was used for other civic functions as well. It is a particular form structural
form conceived of with a central court surrounded by side aisles.
The point of the basilican layout is intended as a covered building well lit from the outside. The inner colonnades support a roof that is higher than those of the surrounding side aisles, and thus the interior is lit by windows on the upper walls over the interior colonnade. The central space is called the nave. The Romans traced the term basilica and the form to Asia. We have already seen it in the model for the Temple of Amon Re at Karnak (3-26). You should be reading through the three identified structures on the plan and identifying each of the structures there, and following the cross references offered in the text and here, to compared material.
The forum itself is a long space ringed by major buildings and its own arcade. It brings us a look at what we shall see to be one of the Roman’s most intersting contributions to the world’s architecture: an esthetic of spaces.
11 Amphitheater, 80 BCE, Pompeii
The amphitheater (double theater) at Pompeii is the oldest of the type to survive.
It’s 350 x 500 oval sat some 20,000 people. Unlike the Greek’s theater,
which was only a half-circle cut into a mountain side for a rise in the seating,
this oval bowl is constructed upon an open plane, through the use of concrete
and vaulting. The basis of the structure is a concrete barrel vaulted
ring around its outer edge, that acts as a retaining wall for earth piled within
it. The seating rises over the solid mass of the mound. Entrance from above
is by way of a paired external staircase at one end and a set of tunnel vaults
radiating like spokes on the grond level.
Romans were masters of arcuate vaulting used for both structural and esthetic
benefit. Barrel vaults—which we have already seen in Mesopotamia,
at Babylon in brick—are more or less a succession of radiating arches.
(See the illustrations on page 249 for explanations.)
Barrel or tunnel vaults are strong and can be extended at great length,
but can be lit only on their ends. Barrel vaults intersecting at right angles
produce cross or groin vaults, and a string of groin vaults have the
advantage of lighting from their open sides. Both structures have great strength
to support weight above. When interconnected they have the strength to support
the enormous seating of such an amphitheater. They also provide entrance and
exit tunnels. This amphitheater was used for gladiatorial competitions among
other things. Our modern term arena comes from the Latin for sand,
used on the central field, to soak up the blood of the contestants.
12 Brawl in the Pompeii Amphitheater, 60-79, 6’1” Pompeii
This painting of the brawl that broke out in the Amphitheater at Pompeii in
59 CE is from Pompeii’s House I.3.23. It was a fight between the Pompeiians
and their neighbors the Nucerians. (Think of modern soccer hooligans.) It reveals
the great staircase that aided entrance and egress and shows the cloth awning
that could be deployed to shield spectators from sun or rain.
It is a good reminder that what we see in any structure that has survived from the ancient world, is its bare bones and that we have lost the perishable flesh of finishing details and the human activities that once animated them.
Reconstruction of a typical Pompeiian house or domus
The great archaeological benefit from the way in which Pompeii was buried in-tact,
is our ability to understand the form of the houses there. It was a wealthy
city of fine large villas. The houses were fairly closed in upon themselves
by thick walls on every side. The basic organization was of one or two courts
built around atriums open to the sky for light. The atriums were surrounded
by cubicula, small rooms that functioned as bedrooms or for other purposes.
At the innermost recess was found the triclinium or dining and gathering room.
The form seems based on earlier Etruscan forms. [Or we might say, it continues
long established Italian forms.
Slatkin points out that the Roman home differed from the Athenian in
that men and women shared it without segregation. Men, women and children ate
together, for instance. And the symbol of female domesticity, the loom, usually
stood in the atrium. This was for the light, but it was at the same time recognition
of the importance and prominence of women in the realm shared with men. She
also points out the presence of erotic wall paintings that were part of normal
bedrooms in Pompeiis houses. Sexual relations were apparently more matter of
fact and somewhat less hidden and suspect in the Roman world than ours.
13 Atrium of the House of the Vettii, 2nd c BCE, Pompeii
We can see a particular example in the well preserved House of the Vettii, remodeled
just after the earthquake of 62 CE. This photo from the entrance shows the entrance
atrium, lit from above and, and the open inner atrium beyond, surrounded by
peristyle colonnades. It also allows us to see the walls covered with brightly
colored painting.
This house was owned by a pair of freedmen brothers, who had made fortunes as
merchants.
* [Plato’s Cave] House of the Faun, 2nd c BCE
The house of the faun, mentioned in our text as revealing, in its atrium fountain sculpture of a faun, “the craze for things Greek” can be seen on Plato’s Cave, as it stands today. The faun in our pictures is a copy of the original, found in the excavations, and now, with most of the finest surviving art, in the Museo Natzionale, Naples.
The art of Rome is of particular interest in the College of Design, because the college supports programs in Rome for all or our departments, and encourages everyone possible to take advantage of them, and thus to see these things first hand. [We also have a University Summer Program that goes to India.]
14 First Style wall painting, Samnite House, late 2nd c. BCE Herculaneum
Roman painting is one of Pompeii’s most treasured survivals
and some of the oldest painting to survive from history. Unlike architecture
and sculpture in stone, painting is much more fragile and vulnerable to the
elements. Historians still use the 19th century division of Roman painting into
four basic styles.
The First Style is also called the Masonry Style. It is depictions
of different sorts of stone paneling. It is a style known around the Mediterranean
back to the 4th century BCE, and continued in use as long as the Romans built
houses. Here we see imitation of different fine marble veneers, in paint.
This is a true fresco style. That is, this is water color painted
upon fresh plaster, before it sets, that then holds the painting as long as
the plaster survives. The finished surface can be polished for extra hard and
smooth effect.
*15 Dionysiac mystery frieze, 2nd Style, Villa of Mysteries
Pompeii, 60-50 BCE 5’4” high
The second style, was popular from 80 to 15 BCE, when it was replaced by the
third style. It is quite different than the first, a fully illusionistic figure
and landscape tradition. There is some controversy over whether or not it can
be traced earlier.
The most famous example is the Dionysiac Mysteries of the House of Mysteries
at Pompeii. The Dionysian Mysteries were a cult popular among Roman women, and
their actual details are unknown. What we see here seems to be the mystery’s
initiation rites, modeled on an emulating of Ariadne, daughter of King Minos
in her marriage to Dionysos. We see females, and one small boy, interacting
with deities.
There has been a good deal of interest in the illusionism of Roman painting,
which is well depicted here. Figures are seen in foreshortenings and overlapping
each other in far more optically effective ways than anything that survives
from earlier periods. [You will notice how the standing woman on the left wall
looks across and meets the gaze of the male figure around the corner on left
of the central wall.] Or similarly how the winged goddess on the other end of
the central wall ships a bare-backed, kneeling woman on the adjoining wall.
We can also note the use of modeling in darker shades to indicate mass in the
figures. These are fully modeled figures, not the outline drawings of Greek
vase painting, or the outline and local color fill-in of Etruscan wall painting.
Perspective here is subtly accomplished in the work’s enframement. Above
and below the red ground of the narrative frieze is First Style paneling as
a frame. Then below there is a narrow green strip, darkened as it rises, to
effectively suggest recession, and so a shallow plane upon which the figures
sit and move.
16 Second style, Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor, 50-40 BCE, Boscoreale,
8’9” high, (now in the Metropolitan Mus, NYC.
This room, taken from a town near Pompeii, shows he interest in illusionism.
The wall is continually opened up as if views of architecture set within distant
vistas. The perspective is inconsistent and so less compelling than that developed
a millenium later in the Renaissance, but it is effective enough to produce
striking vignettes in many of the details, and a triumph of handsome decoration.
There is use of linear perspective, that is drawings of buildings depicted along
diagonals that meet (at least by implication) in a single vanishing point. And
of course there is the modeling of mass in tonal gradation to dark on one side
of a rounded structure, or one face of a geometric one.
17 Gardenscape, Villa of Livia, 6’ 7”, 30-20 BCE, Primaporta
[The cubiculum M frescos show architectural forms and objects arranged in what
later artists have called still life space: space
created through the implications of interlocking and overlapping forms.] The
Gardenscape of the Villa of Livia shows space through aerial
or atmospheric perspective: horizontal registers moving
into the distance by rising higher in the picture planes as coloring grows bluer,
and profiles softer. There are clearer objects in the foreground, the fence,
the birds, and less clear ones higher up like the foliage, indicating distance,
further away. A few, the wall bending around the tree with diagonals moving
away in one point linear perspective is a stronger element. Surprisingly, there
is no framing detail at all, just the landscape scene.
This is the Villa of Livia, the wife of the emperor Augustus, at Primaporta,
just north of Rome. As the most powerful women in Rome, Livia commanded the
finest artists to decorate and to privide art for her residences. It is a rare
subject, we have seen before in Crete (4-10), a pure landscape. But where that
was a painting about landscape, this one breaks the conceptual barrier into
the space of intuitive response: we go beyond thinking it to feeling it.
This is the advance of materialistic Roman painting over previous, more linear diagrammed art. The Romans achieved a level of optical realism that can be responded to intuitively, and left enough of it for us to recognize. Other cultures of this, or earlier times, may have achieved similar effects, but their work has not survived. Not that this was of overwhelming interest to the Romans themselves. They abandoned the style almost as soon as they had developed it.
18 Third style, Cubiculum 15 of Villa of Argippa Postumus,
7’ 8”, c 10 BCE, Boscotrecase
The Third Style was an elegant decorative form of linear architectural fantasies
on monochrome panels. Sometimes, as here there are tiny landscape motifs floating
in the monochrome voids. Perspective and mass are used, but only as subtle elements
in a linear fantasy.
19 The old farmer of Corycus, folio 7 verso of the
Vatican Vergil, c 400-420, 1’
The pastoral imagery of Roman landscape painting echoes the pastoral imagery
that held an important place in Roman poetry. Vergil is one of the most famous
authors in this genre. Horace is another. [Pastoral imagery is an interesting
accompaniment to cultures that have become focused in great urban sites, where
the countryside ceases to be a reality and may become a terrain for nostalgic
idealization.] The Vatican library’s 5th century book of Vergil’s
poetry and accompanying illustrations is one of the earliest illustrated books
to survive.
The page we have shows text above and a red and black framed scene of simple design. Recession is accomplished by five or six horizontally receding registers: foreground earth, foliage and people, middle ground plane of grass (?), a building along with a line of trees, and a blue sky. All four square and simple.
We see it here not because it is great art, or much art at all, but because it is a rare survival. And, I suppose because it has more of a landscape than strictly anecdotal subject. Tempera (egg-based) colors on parchment.
20 Fourth style, Rm 78, Domus Aurea of Nero, 64-78, Rome
The Fourth became popular in the second half of the 1st century CE. It combines
the illusionism of the Second Style with enlarged clichés of the floating
imagery of the Third Style. Here all the walls are coursed by decorative borders
and architectural fantasies, within which float framed images of particular
scenes, as if they were framed paintings hung upon the wall.
21 Fourth style wall painting, Ixion Rm, House of the Vettii Pompeii, c 70-79 BCE
The latest 4th Style painting at Pompeii, just before the eruption, features particularly strong color and crowded, confused compositions. The Ixion Room is the Triclinium of the House of the Vettii, that opened on the peristyle atrium seen in 10-13. Here we get a compendium of all four styles: imitation marble paneling, architectural fantasies of both the linear and substantial varieties, floating scenes and framed scenes with illusionistic pretentions.
The main subject here is the figurative panel showing Ixion, who tried to seduce
Hera, only to be punished by Zeus, by being tied to a spinning wheel. This Greek
myth was a typical subject, [indicating the distance between Roman and Greek
mythology, though the gods had similar titles and characteristics.]
22 Neptune and Amphitrite, mosaic, House of Neptune and Amphitrite,
c 62-79, Herculaneum,
Here is another Greek subject, that is a subject from Greek, as opposed to Latin
mythology. We see the sea god Neptune and his wife Amphitrite, standing in a
decorative niche, like a stage proscenium. The technique is mosaic and the work
stood behind a fountain on the wall of the villa’s triclinium. Before
the Romans, mosaics were confined to floors, but the Romans put them on walls
and even ceilings.
23 Portrait of a husband and wife, House VII.2.6, 70-79 BCE, Pompeii,
1’ 11” high
Here is a fragment from a Fourth Style framed image, removed from its wall and
taken to the Naples museum. The man holds a scroll, the woman a wax writing
tablet. These mark it as a marriage portrait of two educated people. The faces
are carefully individualized in the Republican manner. Each head is strongly
modeled, though only the woman’s with a single light source, with shading
on her left side, where the man is shaded more conventionally, to each side.
While not as optically veristic as some sculpture we have seen, it is relatively
veristic.
[Slatkin] Women in Rome
“Unlike their earlier Greek counterparts, they [Roman women] played an
active role in public and private life. Roman women could own property, inherit
estates and run family businesses...Roman women were not confined to their homes,
as Greek women had been, but mingled freely in the market place, went to the
theater or amphitheater, and bathed in public baths.” Common women practiced
a number of occupations. Slatkin lists physicians, entrepreneurs, prostitutes,
waitresses, and tradeswomen, weavers, lime burners, clothes-menders, mid-wives
and nurses, stenographers, singers and actresses. Spinning and weaving continued
to be a major occupation of women in all classes, it was one of the official
virtues expected of women [like service in the army for men]. Where commercial
weaving was done by both men and women, women alone were spinners of thread.
During Republican times virtually all upper-class women were required to marry.
The one identity of a female artist to come down to us from Roman history was
Iaia of Kyzikos, whom Boccaccio called Marcia). She was a painter who specialized
in portraits of women. She was particularly noted for working faster then others
and for gaining higher prices for her work than well know male painters.
It is a measure of the success of the feminist art historians at demonstrating the need for including women in history that Gardner now not only includes images of Roman women, as it has all along since they were prominent subjects, but discussion of women in history. The discussion of Iaia of Cyzicus in our 11th edition is an addition, not in the previous 10.
Iaia of Cyzicus, who remained a virgin allher life, painted at Rome during the time when M. Varro (116-27 B.C.) was a youth, both with a brush and with a cestrum on ivory, specializing mainlyin portraits of women; she also painted a large panel in Naples representing an old woan and a portrait of herself doneith a miror. Her hand was quicker than that of any other painter, and her artistry was of such high quality that she commanded much higher prices than the most celebrated painters of the same period.
24 Still life with peaches, 1’ 2”, c 62-79, Herculaneum
The last piece of Republican art we will see is this little still life. We see
carefully modeled green peaches and a glass pitcher on a pair of steps. Space
is set up effectively by alternating the tones of the planes facing us and those
angled away. Each peach on the branch is modeled separately with shadows to
one side and highlights. [Mostly these are below and to our right, but it
is not rigorously consistent “lighting” such as we will find in
the Renaissance. It is more symbolic mass than observed mass.]
Gardner’s author sees these as more closely observed than I do. He has
a better argument for the pitcher than the peaches. The pitcher, in clear glass,
shows the highlights to one side and reflections effectively coordinated, in
convex as well as concave, to convince us of transparency as well as mass.
These apparent interests in empirical study and convincing, veristic portrayal of the optical world seem characteristic of Roman culture with its focus on accepting and manipulating material reality, in contrast to the idealizations we find so prominent in the art of the Greeks, previously.