Pompeii and the Roman Villa at the National Gallery of Art

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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Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

While I was in San Diego last weekend I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown (1100 & 1001 Kettner Blvd - right next to the train station). My in-laws had gone to the branch of the museum in La Jolla earlier in the week (700 Prospect St). Downtown there was a special exhibit called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. It showcased works created by artists who had participated in residencies at world heritage sites around the world.

From MCASD's website:

Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet is a pioneering artist residency and collaborative exhibition project that, for the first time on this scale, uses contemporary art to investigate the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend upon them. This collaborative multi-year exhibition project sent eight leading artists to eight UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences in these diverse cultural and natural regions.

If I had to pick a favorite it would be Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's film of the Mistubishi saltworks. The movement of the camera, the stillness of the landscape, and the invasion of the trucks stunned. He also made a montage of MacBeth card shots, which help in color correcting film, which is something that I'm currently a little obsessed with. It wasn't the biggest message of the collection, but the films certainly stood on their own as art.

I would probably have dug the performance of Ann Hamilton's piece, but the installation of ephemera from the performance combined with audio and video both used in and of the performance didn't have the impact that I imagine the performance itself had. Trying to recreate the urgency of performance in an installation is tricky. There was an exhibit as part of New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch at the Austin Museum of Art - Downtown during SxSW 2008 that was basically a karaoke machine of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speech in Washington, D.C. When visitors picked up the microphone and performed the speech, it was really quite moving. I wonder if something to that effect couldn't have helped this piece. There was a script of the performance on a stand. How many steps is it from a script on a stand to a karaoke machine?

Dario Robleto's collections of macabre ephemera were definitely the most compelling pieces in the show. Particularly a piece which was basically a glass curio cabinet filled with frames containing typed stories about specific Lazarus species. If you think about museum signage like I think about museum signage this piece was particularly interesting in that it was a display of museum signage - these framed cards could easily be attached to a wall next to a photo or display or, apropos San Diego, a zoo enclosure. But in this piece the labels are the objects on display. Makes me want to collect museum labels.

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More Color Theory

I finally finished Exercise 1.4 in The New Munsell(R) Student Color Set. The exercise basically asks you to complete the book by filling in the blanks on the color charts with colored chips. I've blogged about Munsell's color theory before elsewhere. I've also blogged about my specific experience assembling the color charts, back when I'd finished only the first three out of ten. Click here to see a new post in which I share my pictures of the completed charts with a few observations.

The Euphronios Krater

In discussing my previous questions with an outside expert, i.e., my mother-in-law, she recalled an interesting bit of news about the Euphronios krater, on p. 136 of the second edition of Stokstad's Art History, fig. 5-28. The krater is captioned in the book as Euphronios (painter) and Euxitheos (potter). Death of Sarpedon. c. 515 BCE. Red-figure decoration on a calyx krater. Ceramic, height of crater 18" (45.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She emailed me an article from the New York Times about the Metropolitan Museum of Art returning the krater to Italy as the Met had apparently acquired the krater from grave robbers in the 1970s. Click here to see the Wikipedia article about the krater which includes links to another New York Times article as well as other sources. Notably, the Wiki's links to the Met's collection database and a description of the piece at the Met's site are broken. A search of the Met's collection database for the piece yields no results.

P.S. I went ahead and edited the wikipedia entry to delete the out of date links to the Met and add the link to the New York Times article my mil sent me.

What is a Cult Statue?

Having posed the question of what a cult statue is in a previous post, I did what any blogger should have done: googled it.

The only clear answer I could find was from Answers.com, which defines a cult statue thusly:

Image of a divinity that served in antiquity as a focal-point for worship and cult rituals. Most cult statues were housed in temples or shrines, although outdoor worship of images is also attested. Although aniconic worship (i.e. of a non-anthropomorphic symbol of a deity such as a rock or pillar) is known in Near Eastern, Greek and Roman cults, most deities by the late 2nd millennium BC were worshiped in an anthropomorphic form and were, as such, earthly substitutes or humanized manifestations of the presence of a deity.

So my tentative answers to my own questions are:
In the description of the Parthenon on pp. 147-153 the author repeatedly refers to the statue of Athena inside the Parthenon as a cult statue. For a specific example see the last paragraph on p. 150. In this context "cult" differentiates between statutes that were not the focal point for worship and cult rituals and a statue that was worshiped. A cult statue is not materially different from another statue of the same subject, but its function was different. I'm guessing there could be a statue of Athena which was not the focus of worship or cult rituals, in which case it would depict the same subject matter as the cult statue of Athena inside the Parthenon, but it would not be a cult statue.

What do you think?

Who is the A.D. Painter?

Having posed the question of who the A.D. Painter is in a previous post, I did what any blogger should have done: googled it.

Searching for Stokstad and "A.D. Painter" led me to a funky website from Prentice Hall. By funky I mean when I try to load it a bunch of errors about missing images fill my screen. But once I closed all of those I got to a one line clue: "Women at a Fountain House, A.D. Painter." You might recall this piece from p. 135, fig. 5-27, where it is attributed to the Priam Painter. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which holds this piece credits it to the Priam Painter as well. They also have a really awesome search engine which allows you to search their collection and provides you with awesome information about each piece. Click here to see the MFA's entry on Women at a Fountain House. Be sure to scroll to the bottom and check out the five different photographs of the piece.

So the answers to my own questions are:
In the section on vase painting, which is pp. 132-137 in the second edition, the A.D. Painter is the Priam Painter. On p. 136 where the author writes that the A.D. Painter created a perfectly balanced composition of verticals and horizontals that take the shape of the vessel into account the author is referring to figure 5-27, Women at a Fountain House.

It's All Greek to Me

I've recently conquered the Greeks. In other words, I've finally finished chapter 5 in the second edition of Stokstad's Art History. But I'm left with two unresolved questions.

First, in the section on vase painting, which is pp. 132-137 in the second edition, who is the A.D. Painter? Is it the Priam Painter? On p. 136 the author writes that the A.D. Painter created a perfectly balanced composition of verticals and horizontals that take the shape of the vessel into account. Does that match the author's description of figure 5-27 or figure 5-26?

Second, in the description of the Parthenon on pp. 147-153 the author repeatedly refers to the statue of Athena inside the Parthenon as a cult statue. For a specific example see the last paragraph on p. 150. What does "cult" mean in this context? Is a cult statue different from another statue of the same subject?