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Prof: Good morning everyone.
As you can see from today's lecture title,
we're going to be talking about painting palaces and villas in
the first century A.D.
But I could also call this lecture a lecture on Third and
Fourth Style Roman wall painting,
because we're going to continue our conversation today about the
four architectural styles of Roman wall painting.
In order to do that, I just want to remind you of
what we talked about last time.
We covered the First and Second Styles of Roman wall painting,
and you'll remember that what they had in common is that they
both tried to create an illusion of what they weren't,
in a sense.
Think back to the First Style of Roman wall painting,
when the painters tried to transform a rubble wall into a
marble wall, to create the illusion that it
was indeed a marble wall, rather than a rubble wall.
And in the case of the Second Style--
and I show you two examples again of that here,
the detail from the Villa of Publius Fannius Sinistor,
on the left-hand side of the screen,
now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
and the House of Augustus, the Room of the Masks in the
House of Augustus, on the Palatine Hill in Rome,
both examples of Second Style Roman wall painting.
And we saw in this instance that the illusion was to create
the sense that you were looking through a window,
to transform, once again, the rubble wall
into a window, a window that showed what might
lie outside the villa, in the peristyle court,
for example.
Remember this one, with the shrine or
tholos that is surrounded by blue sky and looks like it is
located perhaps in a domestic peristyle,
and then over here this window that opens onto a sacro-idyllic
landscape.
We are being beckoned into that sacro-idyllic landscape to
explore the sacred items within it and even beyond.
So opening up these walls illusionistically,
to create an illusion in both, but in the case of the Second
Style, to open the wall up
illusionistically as a panoramic window.
We also explored the fact that in the Second Style the Roman
designers, the Roman painters,
seemed to have experimented with one-point linear
perspective, this perspective in which all
points recede to a single point in the distance,
and that we see that use of one-point perspective in the
Second Style wall paintings in the Room of the Masks.
We also talked about the relationship between Second
Style Roman wall painting and theatrical architecture --
that they may have been looking at actual theaters,
possibly in wood, possibly in other more
permanent materials that no longer survive,
or they may have been creating this,
in part, out of whole cloth.
So this connection to the theater,
and the one last point that I want to remind you of is the
fact that we also discussed that,
although there's an enormous respect for earlier Greek
architecture, not only in these painting but
in the temples and in the cities and in the sanctuaries that
we've already explored, and we see the Roman painters
using those elements of Greek architecture--
columns and pediments and the like--
in the Second Style, we also see that they are
beginning to break the rules.
They have a respect for Greek architecture,
but they're also willing to bend the rules,
an example being, of course, their use of the
triangular pediment here, but they have broken that
triangular pediment apart to reveal the tholos here.
This is a very important development,
and we saw it already also in the Sanctuary of Fortuna
Primigenia at Palestrina, where you'll remember the
column capitals in the ramp and how they slanted those column
capitals in a way that Greek architects never would have
done.
We see that same sort of breaking of the rules here.
It's extremely important because it shows again that
although they revered the past, they were willing to look
forward to the future.
And we're going to see, especially in the late first
century A.D., into the second century A.D.,
further exploration of that kind of thing,
and it's going to have a huge impact on Roman architecture.
In order to explore the Third and Fourth Styles,
I need to go to a couple of other cities than the ones we've
looked at thus far.
I have the map here once again that shows Campania.
We are going to be looking at the city of -- or a villa -- in
the town of Oplontis, which you see here.
We'll also be looking at an important villa at Boscotrecase.
And you can see the proximity of those two to the sites we've
already discussed--Pompeii, Herculaneum,
Boscoreale, and also Naples, up here.
I want to look first at a villa, or the paintings at a
villa, at Oplontis.
This villa--and you see a plan of it here--appears to have
belonged to a woman by the name of Poppaea--P-o-p-p-a-e-a.
Who was Poppaea?
Poppaea was first the mistress and then the wife of Rome's
notorious emperor Nero.
Initially it looked as if the two were soul mates because she
seemed to have as much of a mean streak as he did,
in that she encouraged him, quite avidly,
to murder his mother, to murder his first wife,
and even to murder the philosopher Seneca.
But despite the fact that they seemed to have been soul mates,
Nero turned against her, and in fact when she announced
to him that she was pregnant, he kicked her in the stomach,
which caused her death.
But after her death he took advantage of her death and
divinized her, made her a diva for his
own political purposes.
So a very interesting saga here, between Nero and his wife
Poppaea.
The reason that we think Poppaea owned this villa,
or lived in this villa at some point--
and the villa dates, we believe, to 20 to 10 B.C.--
the reason we believe that she lived there is that there was an
amphora, one of these terracotta pots,
that was found in the excavation with the name of a
freedman, a freedman of Poppaea,
which suggests that she may well have lived there.
The other interesting observation that archaeologists
made when they excavated this particular house is that it
looked like it had been empty at the time of the eruption of
Vesuvius, when it had been indeed covered
over with ash and lava.
And they also found a lot of tools lying around the house,
which led to their belief that the house was probably in the
process of being renovated.
It may have suffered damage in the earthquake and was in the
process of being renovated, before reuse,
at the time Vesuvius struck.
If we look at this very good plan of what is preserved of
this villa today, we can pick out a number of
features that we've already become accustomed to in our
study of Roman domestic architecture:
houses and villas.
We can see peristyle courts with columns,
for example.
We notice here the very large atrium, with the
impluvium designated here in plan.
There was a kitchen, an extensive kitchen,
over here as well.
We also see the use of columns, these colonnades that are part
of peristyles, in some cases,
but also are colonnades that look out from the villa toward
what surrounds it -- the landscape and the sea and
so on, that surround it.
And it's another example of what we began to see in the
second phase of the plan of the Villa of the Mysteries in
Pompeii, and that is an opening up of
the facade, an incorporation of a larger
number of windows to make the facade lighter and more airy,
as well as a series of colonnades with spectacular
views toward what lay outside the villa.
The most important room for us today is Room Number 8,
over here, and that room is part of an interior bath,
an elaborate interior bath, that was part of this villa.
And Room Number 8, which is basically a
rectangular room, as you can see here,
was the caldarium or the warm room of that bath,
and it has some very interesting paintings that will
show us the transition between what we know of as Second Style
Roman wall painting and what we term Third Style Roman wall
painting.
This is a view of the villa as it looks today.
You can see, like Herculaneum,
it is very closely surrounded <