The Social Life of Roman Painting in Pompeii.
“Painting within Roman houses owed its importance to a dynamics of social usage involving a series of activities quite different from those that normally take place within the houses of today.” Elinor Windsor Leach.[1]
Unlike the Greeks the Roman house extended out into the public sphere and was considered a symbol of the status of its occupant. While the Greeks kept their households private, their women cloistered away from public view, the Romans encouraged visitors, hence their houses needed to be decorated with grandeur and elegance in order to impress those who entered into them. As Winsor Leach says: “such interiors did not merely accommodate visitors; they demanded them.” [2] Thanks to a number of Roman writers like Cicero and Vitruvius we know the names of spaces where visitors would wait, be received, or engage in social activities. Rooms like atriums and vestibules would become inevitably crowded, especially in the morning, where we can imagine such throngs against a background of painted murals in Pompeian atria.[3] In the atria there may have been family portraits; or ancestral portrait masks evoking family associations. In the garden area or peristyle (open court surrounded by a garden) one may have seen mythological figures Venus and Mars in the Casa della Venere (above). There were also rooms devoted to specific types of painting: garden galleries which could be ones to be seen by day or seen by night (Casa del Frutetto). The pinacotheca (picture galleries) were arranged like a showcase for the display of art objects and precious family treasures. This was “the model for Roman decorative scenes” like in the Ixion Room in the House of the Vettii, or possibly the more esoteric scheme in the triclinium (dining room) of the Villa of the Mysteries. Descriptions of picture galleries occur in literature like Cicero’s Contra Verres, where Cicero accuses the corrupt governor Verres of adorning his property with looted art.We also learn from Pliny the Elder that Augustus employed a landscape painter called Studius or Ludius who earned little money, but great fame with his views.[4] All these sources while not infallible serve to enhance our understanding of how the surviving paintings at Pompeii may have been viewed, though we shall never know for sure.
[1] Eleanor Winsor Leach, The Social Life of Painting, 18.
[2] Ibid, 19.
[3] An atrium was an inner court open to the sky and surrounded by the roof.
[4] “He painted villas, porticoes, and parks, groves, copses, hills, fishponds, straits, rivers, shores, as anyone could wish. And there he painted all kinds of people walking or going by ship, riding by land towards the villages on donkeys’ backs or in carriages, also fishermen, fowlers, huntsmen or vintagers.” Cited in Ernst Gombrich (“The Renaissance Theory and Rise of Landscape” in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, Phaidon, 1966, 107-121, 113) who sees this as an impetus to renaissance artists.
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