Pompeian Wall Paintings

Pompeian Wall Paintings

The House of the Vettii (Casa di Vettii)

Pompeii	Pompeian Wall Painting	House of the Vettii	Entrance and Atrium
Peristyle	Oecus1	Oecus 2 and Triclinium	Bibliography

Pompeii

Pompeii is situated on a small volcanic hill, about 5 1/2 miles southeast of the still active volcanic mountain, Mt. Vesuvius, very close to modern day Naples. In antiquity the town spanned approximately 160 acres and had a population of 10,000 inhabitants (Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 95 - 103). The town met its sudden end in 79 CE in a massive eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that covered the site with volcanic ash and debris. The eruption is described by Pliny the Younger (Letters 16 and 20) and has stuck in the imaginations of adventurers, scholars, and artists ever since. This site was rediscovered in 1748 and since that time intermittent excavation has been accomplished so that almost 3/4 of the site is revealed today.

Pompeii was a port town for Nola, Nuceria, and Acerrae and its commercial and strategic position near the mouth of the Sarnus River, the gateway to Campania, explains its rich history. The site (according to Strabo, the geographer) was occupied successively by Oscans, Etruscans, Pelasgians, Samnites, and Romans.

The town preserved by the eruption was a prosperous one, a market for wines, millstones, fish sauce, and perfumes to the entire Mediterranean community. As such, a class of wealthy businessmen had dwellings in the town, suitably decorated for their wealth, status, and in the style of the time. There are some 1800 buildings in the town of Pompeii, many of them domestic, and many dwellings of the very rich. The House of the Vettii is one such house, the wall paintings of which we will examine on this web site.

Pompeiian Wall Painting

The majority of extant Roman paintings are murals executed on wet plaster. This may be attributed to the luck of survival but in a very real sense indicates the true state of pictorial art in the Roman period. Portable pictures on wooden panels were popular in the Classical and Hellentistic periods and continued to some extent in the Roman period, the notable surviving examples evidenced in the mummy portraits from the Fayum in Egypt. Wall-paintings were applied on both the internal and external surfaces, but, for obvious reasons, many internal paintings have survived, except in the case of Pompeii, where a town-full of wall paintings have lasted to the present time.

Roger Ling outlines four main points about Roman wall painting (Ling 1992, 1 - 2):

Ancient houses were painted much more than today. Today we tend to think of individually commissioned murals as reserved for only the very rich yet in Pompeii and Herculaneum it was a daily occurrence.
Quality varies from room to room. The more important, and therefore more highly visible and visited rooms, received better paintings.
Paintings must be considered in the context of the architecture settings in which they occur. What was the function of the room? Was it well lit? How does it work with pavements? With furniture?
Wall paintings are a measure of the artistic taste and social aspirations of the owner of the house.

The large corpus of wall paintings that survive at Pompeii, because of the archaeologically useful eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, led a German scholar, Augustus Mau (1882) to develop, during the years of study he put in at Pompeii, a sequence of four painting styles that fit into a specific chronological framework. He designated the different styles as First Style, Second Style, etc. In the House of the Vettii, we will mostly encounter wall paintings of the Third- and Fourth- Styles, therefore the most "modern" styles when the eruption of Pompeii occurred.

The colors used in the wall paintings at Pompeii were made of plain earth (ochre), minerals (carbonate of copper), and dyes of animal or vegetable origins for Pompeian reds, blues, greens, yellow, and black. Black resulted in a lustrous tone, easily polished, and thus was used in the best rooms to give a luxurious impression. The pigments were often supplemented with a soapy limestone and bonding element to adhere them to the wall. The finished painting was polished with wax to make them shine and preserve them from the incessant bonbardment of smoke and dirt.

Vitruvius, a famous writer on architecture, states that a pinacotheca (picture gallery) is an essential feature of the domestic apartments of a high class gentleman.

The House of the Vettii

This house was owned by two freedmen who became wealthy businessmen in Pompeii: Aulus Vettius Conviva and Aulus Vettius Restitutus, and from their names the house gets its name. The excellent excavation methods used in recovering the house allowed the archaeologists to preserve almost all of the fourth style wall paintings complete after the earthquake of 62 CE.

The house is centered around two foci, the atrium around which there is a servant's quarters with its own atrium and kitchen and the peristyle court around which there are living rooms (oeci), a dining room (triclinium), and the women's quarters. Originally the house had two atria but in the 1^st century CE, it was altered substantially so that the visitor passed directly from the atrium into the peristyle court and guarden in the back of the house. This discussion will focus on the painted decorations in the main atrium, oecus 2 and oecus 1, and the triclinium. The wall paintings were commissioned from one of the leading artists' workshops in Pompeii so that the home of the Vettii would not only be comfortable but also a expression of their new found, free, wealthy status.

Entrance and Atrium

Priapus

The visitor to the House of the Vettii would have been greeted by a fresco of Priapus weighing his enormous phallus. Priapus was a god of fertility from the Hellespont region of Asia Minor and was associated with important divinities of that region. His symbol is an enormous, almost grotesque phallus. He was adopted as a god of gardens and became something of a combined scarecrow and guardian deity. Here, in the foyer of the House of the Vettii, he was meant to portray the abundant wealth and good fortune of the house's occupants. The Priapic imagery continues in the house in a statue of the deity found near the kitchen.

Cupids in the Atrium

The atrium is decorated with scenes of sacrifice, hunting, and cupids "surfing" on the backs of sea creatures, including dolphins, lobsters, and crabs. The cupid theme is a popular in the late 1^st and 2^nd centuries CE is Roman art. Cupids are often depicted in whimsical scenes, often carrying out the type of work usually associated with humans in a humorous or burlesque manner. The House of the Vettii adopts this Cupid theme wholeheartedly. Here in the atrium of the house the Cupids on Crustaceans both incorporates the stylistic trends of the period and alludes to the wealth that the produce of the sea brought to many merchants in Pompeii, the Vettii being no exception. Pompeii was famed for its production of garum, fish sauce, and it may well be that the exportation of fish sauce and sea products may have contributed to the Vettii's success. The Cupids are a unique and clever evocation of playfulness, liveliness, wealth, success, fortune and the gifts of the sea.

Peristyle

Garden
	The garden has been mostly rebuilt according to the orignal layer. There were bronze statuettes of cupids, echoing the theme begun in the atrium, and other busts and heads in marble. There were fountains along the four sides and round fountains in the four corners. A separate aqueduct fed water to the house and must have kept the fountains running, a cool respite in the heat of the summer.

Wall Decorations

The walls of the peristyle walkway are decorated with black panels, edged in Pompeiian red with a yellow background. The black panels alternately contain still life and figure paintings.

Two elaborate reception rooms look out onto the peristyle (or alternatively, you can think of visitors to the peristyle of looking in these rooms), oecus 1 and oecus 2.

OECUS 1

CUPIDS, CUPIDS, and more CUPIDS (and PSYCHES) Whole clans of cupids and their female counterparts, psyches, occur as a decorative theme in this room. A continuous frieze runs around the room, approximately one meter from the floor. The height of the placement of the frieze suggests that the room was a dining-room, or at least a room in which people sat, for the pictures at a height that they can best be enjoyed by sitting. The infant Cupid and Psyches carry out a range of human activities: viniculture, metal-working and jewelry making, perfume production, cloth preparation, and chariot racing. The figures are exquisitely painted on a black ground and achieve their greatest success from their skillful parody of human gestures of self-importance. Although this burlesque genre of painting, where animal or mythical figures carry out business activities, was common beginning about the 4^th c BCE, the artist of the series of vignettes in this room, surely must be considered a master. The details are very finely observed and there is a freedom and surety in their composition that indicates the artist was not merely using a copybook but creating small masterpieces from his own imagination.
	The scenes of viniculture here have led some scholars to speculate that it was in wine production that the brothers Vettii made their fortune.
	Garland making. Loading garlands on goats for transport.
	Metal-working and jewelry-making.
	Cloth preparation.
	Chariot racing and carts.
	The upper part of the walls in the room of the Cupids were red panels, centered with scenes of Maenads and Satyrs, framed by delicate architectural elements like the one at the right. At the bottom of the columnar panels were small vignettes of sacrifice. Here the averted sacrifice of Iphigenia, a deer has been substituted in her stead.

Oecus 2 and Triclinium

Fourth Style Painting Gallery The two rooms are the furthermost ends of the east of the peristyle and balanced in the manner of their decoration. Each room, above the dado, is painted in the Fourth Style: illusionistic architectural frames leave large expanses of wall which contain central panels, for the most part painted with mythological scenes. In this style of wall painting, the images were generally copies of celebrated Greek originals, and therefore were seen as authentic art collections, branding the householder as an art-lover and collector. In Oecus 2, the mythological scenes were Hercules strangling the snakes, the punishment of Dirce, and Penteus being torn apart. In the triclinium, there was Daedalus and Pasiphae, the punishment of Ixion, and Bacchus watching Ariadne as she lies sleeping, abandoned by Theseus.
Hercules as a baby strangling snakes sent as a punishment by Hera.

	Pentheus torn apart by his mother Agave and Maenads.
Dirce's punishment, trampling by a bull.
	Ariadne watched by Bacchus as she sleeps, after her abandonment by Theseus on the Naxian shores.
Pasiphae being presented with the little cow costume made for her by the master craftsman, Daedalus.
	The punishment of Ixion, to turn forever on a wheel in Hades.

Bibliography

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