My friend Mary and I, the last remaining members of the Art History Reading Group (a.k.a. A(rg)H) had the opportunity to tour the exhibit Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibit is free and runs through March 22, 2009.
If you're reading along in the second edition of Marilyn Stokstad's Art History, this exhibit was particularly relevant to pages 203 through 211 in the chapter on Etruscan Art and Roman Art.
The exhibition is organized into three sections: Roman houses and villas, Romans' interest in all things Greek, and the influence of ancient Rome on European art after the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii in the 18th century.
In the chapters we've read so far (through chapter 6 Etruscan Art and Roman Art), Stokstad spends a lot more time on architecture than I expected. In her chapter on Etruscan Art and Roman Art she dedicates half the chapter exclusively to architecture. The first part of the Pompeii exhibit ties in nicely with Stokstad's coverage of architecture in ancient Rome in general and her specific coverage of Pompeii.
The houses covered in Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples do not overlap with the houses Stokstad covers. Stokstad covers the House of the Silver Wedding, the House of M. Lucretius Fronto, the House of Julia Feliz, the House of the Vettii, the House of Pansa, and the Villa of the Mysteries. Pompeii and the Roman Villa includes works from the House of the Golden Bracelet, the House of the Centenary, the House of the Tragic Poet, the House of Gaius Cornelius Rufus, the House of the Menander, the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus, and the House of Gaius Julius Polybius as well as some houses in neighboring Herculaneum. To supplement the map on page 204 of Stokstad, I've found a map, posted by Dr. John R. Hoaglund, that shows the location of most of these houses.
Stokstad opens her discussion of The Roman City and Home by stating:
Despite their urbanity, Romans liked to portray themselves as simple country folk who had never lost their love of nature. The middle classes enjoyed their townhome gardens, wealthy city dwellers maintained rural estates, and Roman emperors had country villas that were both functioning farms and places of recreation. Wealthy Romans even brought nature indoors by commissioning artists to paint landscapes on the interior walls of their homes.Pompeii and the Roman Villa recognizes that same theme. One of the most spectacular artifacts in the exhibit is a fresco of a Garden scene from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii created sometime between the 1st century B.C.E. and the 1st century C.E. According to the brochure,
The painted gardens visually expanded small ones, as in the so-called House of the Golden Bracelet where frescoes of flowering shrubs, birds, and fountains adjoined the real garden behind the house.The architecture of the houses reflected the Roman's love of nature by locating the the most private domestic areas around the peristyle garden.
Another striking artifact in the Pompeii and the Roman Villa exhibit was the recreation of a dining room "or triclinia — so called because they contained three couches on which diners reclined while eating," from Moregine, south of Pompeii. The most striking feature of this triclina are the frescoed walls depicting "the god Apollo, patron of the liberal arts, flanked by the muses." These muses appear on a background of brilliant, deep red that was very popular with Roman painters and is now known as "Pompeian red", according to Stokstad who describes its use in the background of fig. 6-34, Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus (?), detail of a wall painting in the Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii, c. 50 BCE. According to the Discovery Guide for the exhibit, green and blue were among the most expensive pigment while yellow and red were the most popular. Like fig. 6-37, Detail of a wall painting in the House of M. Lucretius Fronto, Pompeii, mid-1st century CE, the fresco in the triclinia is divided into panels bordered with painted architectural moldings. Unlike the way the figures interact with one another and the architectural details painted in Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus (?), the figures in the fresco in the triclinia do not interact with the architectural details. Instead individual figures float in the middle of the brightly colored background. This arrangement, a figure in the center of a large blank background usually framed by trompe l'oeil architectural details, became known as a "floating maenad."
The muses depicted in the fresco in the triclinia are one example of the Romans' interest in Greek mythology. Like Stokstad, a significant portion of the exhibit was dedicated to the Romans' interest in Greek art, history, and mythology. Specifically with regard to Pompeii the connection between Roman and Greek culture is particularly strong as Pompeii was a former Greek colony, as noted in the brochure for Pompeii and the Roman Villa. Roman art adopted the style of classical and pre-classical Greek art. Roman art depicted Greek subjects, like Plato, Alexander the Great, Homer, The Trojan War, and Theseus Fighting the Centaurs. Roman art patrons imported Greek artists and Greek materials, particularly stone.
A Roman twist on Greek art that I found particularly interesting is the move from public spaces to private spaces. Specifically the brochure noted,
In Greece statues of gods and goddesses were set up in sanctuaries and public places, but in Pompeii a sculpture of Artemis (no. 102), goddess of the hunt, was installed in a colonnade around a domestic garden; formerly public art became private.Would Greeks have painted Apollo and the Muses around their personal dining room? Or would that have reduced the divine to the merely decorative?
Also like Stokstad, the exhibit drew connections between Greek pieces and Roman pieces to demonstrate what aspects of Greek art ancient Romans adopted. Like the inclusion of works by other contemporaneous portrait artists in the Bernini show at the Getty, I found this comparative approach very helpful.
I was not blown away by the exhibit's coverage of the 18th century reception of the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii. Perhaps it drew a parallel between the Romans at Pompeii in the 1st century obsessed with all things Greek, buying reproductions of Greek art to decorate their homes, to the Western Europeans of the 18th century obsessed with all things Pompeian, buying reproduction of Roman art to decorate their homes. Something about this section reduced all of the exhibit to a cycle of consumption. The fact it opened onto a gift shop probably didn't help any.
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