BMCR 2009.05.18: Clarke on Mattusch, Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples. National Gallery of Art, October 19, 2008-March 22, 2009; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 3-October 4, 2009

Carol C. Mattusch (ed.), Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture
around the Bay of Naples. National Gallery of Art, October 19,
2008-March 22, 2009; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 3-October 4,
2009.  Washington:  National Gallery of Art, 2008.  Pp. xvi, 365.  ISBN
9780894683534.  $40.00 (pb).
Contributors:  Mary Beard, Bettina Bergmann, Stefano De Caro, Pietro
Giovanni Guzzo, and Kenneth Lapatin

Reviewed by John R. Clarke, University of Texas at Austin
([email protected])
Word count:  2031 words
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The work of this well-designed and beautifully illustrated catalogue is
to provide a context for two kinds of objects displayed in the
accompanying exhibition: 116 paintings, sculptures, and small finds
from the region buried by Vesuvius and another 40 documenting the
response to rediscovery--a process that began in the mid-eighteenth
century and continues to the present.  Carol Mattusch takes on the
lion's share of this work, providing introductory essays as well as the
scholarly catalogue entries for each object.  Most of the contributors'
essays have a broad focus on the entire region of the Bay of Naples:
Stefano De Caro on villas; Kenneth Lapatin on luxury items; Mary Beard
on art collections; and Pietro Giovanni Guzzo on archaeological work.
One essay, Bettina Bergmann's "Staging the Supernatural: Interior
Gardens of Pompeian Houses," focuses exclusively on Pompeii.
Scholarly notes appear at the end of the volume, along with a brief
bibliography, glossary, and index.  I first consider the essays, ending
with an assessment of Mattusch's catalogue.

De Caro's essay reviews the archaeological and literary evidence for
the Roman villa on the Bay of Naples and considers its significance for
the development of urban domestic architecture.  He follows the history
of the development of the type citing well-known literary sources and
ending with the phenomenon first articulated by Paul Zanker, of
"imitation" villas at Pompeii.[[1]]  He peppers his essay with
tantalizing tidbits of information, fruit of his forty years of work in
the region; for instance, we learn that an octagonal diaeta at Oplontis
(Villa A, room 78) boasted walls sheathed in precious woods, and that
splendid glass-paste mosaics paved the bottom of the swimming pool at
the recently discovered villa at Massalubrense.

"Luxus," the title of Lapatin's essay, reminds the readers repeatedly
of the price of luxury for the Roman elite, both because it cost so
much and because paying outrageous sums for luxury exposed the buyer to
moral criticism.  By the late first century B.C.--and especially in
their villas around the Bay of Naples where conspicuous consumption
attracted less criticism than at Rome--the super-rich indulged
themselves.  To the literary evidence decrying Roman indulgence in the
consumption of costly exotic fish, Lapatin asks us to consider the
famous "aquarium" mosaics (e.g., Pompeii VIII.2.16), as well as the
food remains found in the excavation of the Roman villa at Epano Skala
(Mytilene, Lesbos).  There is better evidence for furniture (though
none for those items made from precious citrus-wood), including
elaborate couches and strongboxes.  Above all, we have ample evidence
for objects for personal adornment (gold jewelry; engraved gems;
pearls); in this connection Lapatin states (but without a reference)
that "of the 1,134 human bodies found in Herculaneum, Pompeii, and its
suburbs, and nearby Oplontis, just under 10 percent wore or carried
jewelry."  Lapatin cites gem lore (mostly from Pliny NH 37) and methods
of gem cutting, analyzing a variety of objects from various
collections, some appearing in the exhibition.

Bergmann's essay, entitled "Staging the Supernatural: Interior Gardens
of Pompeian Houses," examines the mixed-media gardens that combine
painted representations of gardens and garden features with real
sculpture and waterworks. "Painted and sculpted figures," she
concludes, "mythologize ordinary space." To demonstrate this point,
Bergmann examines several well-preserved houses, paying special
attention to patterns of viewing and associations the owners and guests
might have made with the imagery.  She suggests, for example, that the
animal parks featured in a dozen houses at Pompeii may refer to the
venationes in the local amphitheater rather than to the private
zoological animal parks or paradeisoi although she connects the image
of Orpheus from the eponymous house with performances of beast-taming
known from literature.  Bergmann's arguments from the specifics of
context and content support her contention that the flora and fauna
represented are not mere staffage but rather meaningful complements to
the mythological stories.

Mary Beard's essay is a meditation on Horace's "Graecia capta. . ."--on
the Roman reception of Greek art and culture.  Roman display of Greek
originals, reproductions, and reinterpretations in their houses and
villas formed part of a dynamic process typical of the "multicultural
melting pot of Roman Italy."   Reuse or creative re-deployment of
famous works of art (e.g., the Alexander mosaic, a famous painting made
into a pavement; the bronze Apollo from the House of Polybius made into
a tray-holder) represented adaptations of Greek culture rather than a
wholesale embrace of it.  Beard asks important questions about this
process of acculturation: How sensitive were Roman collectors to the
styles of the Greek works they acquired? How long did Greek objects
appear foreign?

Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, long-time Superintendent of the region buried by
Vesuvius, ends the catalogue with a rapid but informative summary of
archaeological investigations around the Bay of Naples, introducing
many new discoveries of the past two decades.  Ceramics Found at Punta
Chiarito, Ischia (the Greek Pithecussa), document the settlement of the
island by Greeks from Euboea at the beginning of the eighth century
B.C., as well as their trade with inhabitants of the mainland and with
Etruria.  The Pithecussans went on to establish a settlement at Cumae,
now documented through the Roman period by excavations of its northern
necropolis and the Forum.  The spectacular finds occasioned by the
construction of the new subway stations in Naples at Piazza Municipio
and Piazza Nicola Amore document the ancient port and include the
well-preserved remains of three wooden boats.  Perhaps the most amazing
discovery is a village founded around 1500 B.C., built in the swamps at
Poggiomarino at the source of the Sarnus River.  It was a kind of
Middle-Bronze-Age Venice, with its many islands shored up by wooden
piles preserved by the damp, along with stilts of the cabins and the
woven-reed mats that covered their floors.  Guzzo's final plea is that
archaeologists and cultural institutions join forces so that "the
cultural and aesthetic messages conveyed by our antique monuments not
be exclusively reserved for the educated elite of the West."

Mattusch has organized the objects in the exhibition under five
rubrics, "Patrons and Proprietors" (cat. 1-16); "Interiors" (cat.
17-63); "Courtyards and Gardens" (cat. 64-91); "A Taste for the
Antique" (cat. 92-116); "Rediscovery" (cat. 117-156).  Among the
portraits exhibited in the first section are a number from American
collections: the Julius Caesar from Toledo, the Augustus from the
Walters, the Livia in black basanite from the Louvre, the turquoise
cameo of Livia and Tiberius from Boston, and the Nero from Worcester.
Two marbles recently discovered at Rione Terra (Pozzuoli), a portrait
of Caligula and a finely-carved torso of a woman, make their debut
outside of their museum at Baia.  The entries are largely biographical,
but since they draw almost exclusively from the sensational accounts of
Suetonius, they are unbalanced in terms of modern historical analysis
and are apt to leave those uninitiated into the techniques of
Suetonius' invective appalled at the monstrous Julio-Claudians.

"Interiors" provides the requisite glitz in this exhibition: gold
jewelry; silverware from the House of the Menander; bronze statuettes,
some inlaid with copper and silver; bronze lampstands; and fine
glass-ware.  Visitors to the show got a surprise in the bronze
lamp-bearer from the House of Fabius Rufus; whereas the photo in the
catalogue presents a dignified if effeminate youth, it arrived complete
with its astonishingly elaborate vine-covered tray that pushes the
statue into the land of kitsch (a good example of the adaptations that
Beard discusses).  Another surprise was the archaistic bronze kouros, a
tray-bearer from the House of Polybius at Pompeii.  Found in 1977 and
languishing in storage ever since, the diademed bronze youth with his
snail-shell curls, inset bone eyes, and stiff frontal position
documents first-century taste for the archaic.  As Mattusch expertly
demonstrates, this tray-bearer is the twin of the Apollo from Piombino
at the Louvre; "the two bronzes might be described as two different
editions of the same original model. . . ready-mades . . . cast
whenever customers . . . requested them."  In the case of the Polybius
bronze (as in the lamp-bearer from the House of Fabius Rufus), the
Roman sculptor adapted the sacred image to a functional use, holding a
tray at a banquet.  An image of just such a bronze tray-bearer appears
in the painting of a banquet scene cut from the wall of the triclinium
in the eponymous house at Pompeii (Naples inv. 120030).

The astonishing garden painting from the House of the Golden Bracelet
forms the centerpiece of the section on gardens and provides a context
for the display of the examples of herm-sculptures, relief-plaques on
pedestals, hanging masks, and oscilla in this section.  The entry on
the head of a boy found at Oplontis gives the date of its excavation as
March 1984; my study of the excavation notebooks records the date as 28
September 1976.

The red-ground Room of the Muses from the excavation of a dining
complex at Moregine beautifully illustrates the taste for showy figural
decoration in fine rooms of the late Fourth Style (A.D. 62-79),
providing a striking context for the objects exhibited under the rubric
"A Taste for the Antique."   Mattusch follows Mastroroberto's dubious
identification of portrait likenesses of Nero and his family as Apollo
and the Muses.[[2]]  It is a disappointment that the famous painting
from the Basilica at Herculaneum did not make it to the exhibition,
especially since its recent cleaning has clarified its iconography.
The catalogue entry does not take into account its astonishing new look
(the photo published in the catalogue is pre-cleaning), debuted in the
2007 exhibition, "Rosso Pompeiano" in the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo
Massimo, Rome.[[3]]

Mattusch's expert discussion of the bronze statue of the girl fastening
her peplos from the Villa of the Papyri describes the effects of hasty
workshop practices for all five of the peplophoroi and underscores
their function as decorative garden ornaments--"probably ordered as a
group" by the proprietor.  In her examination of the gesture of the
Aphrodite found at the amphitheater of Capua in 1750, Mattusch explains
how the goddess was probably admiring her own reflection in the
polished surface of a shield held in her outstretched arms. Two
recently-discovered marbles from Rione Terra, a head of the Athena
Lemnia and an Aphrodite with buttery drapery, stand out by reason of
their quality.

"Rediscovery" traverses the by-now familiar subject of European
response to the unearthing of the buried Vesuvian towns and villas
beginning with the discovery of the Large and Small Herculaneum Women
in 1709. This rubric is a veritable cabinet of curiosities, including
artificial volcanoes and Pompeian tragedies staged for a voracious
public, potboiler novels, tragic paintings, and even more tragic
sculptures, like Randolph Rogers' "Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii"
(1860).  Mattusch provides a fascinating account of the vagaries of
modern discovery, guided during the first initial century by the whims
of the Bourbon treasure-hunters, and the selective publication of finds
by the Reale Accademia Ercolanese di Archeologia, established in 1755.
In particular, the publication of the wall paintings influenced
European taste for the next half-century in everything from interiors
to furniture and decorative objects.

For the nineteenth century the record includes photographs of the
ever-popular casts of victims (thanks to the techniques developed in
the 1860s under Giuseppe Fiorelli, the first scientific director of
excavations at Pompeii) and stereographs.  Reproductions, such as
Chiurazzi's  replica of the table from the House of C. Cornelius Rufus,
or Vincenzo Gemito's reinterpretation of the "Narcissus," flooded an
eager market, especially in the United States.  Along with
loosely-conceived paintings of interiors inhabited by Victorian-looking
"Pompeians" (Luigi Bazzani, "A Pompeian Interior," 1882; Lawrence
Alma-Tadema, "A Sculpture Gallery," 1874), it is surprising to find two
actual-state views of the interior of the House of M. Lucretius Fronto
by Danish painter Josef Theodore Hansen (1905), precious testimony of
the condition of the house just after it had been restored with modern
roofs.

Mattusch, in both the catalogue and the exhibition, has made a solid
contribution to the study of Pompeii and the region buried by Vesuvius.
If the catalogue gracefully instructs the neophyte while also
providing (particularly in her expertise in ancient sculpture) new
scholarly observations and a solid bibliography, the exhibition
represents a fresh perspective, beautifully coordinating cultural
artifacts--many not seen before in the United States--from a variety of
sources.


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Notes:


1.   Paul Zanker, "Die Villa als Vorbild des spaeten pompejanischen
Wohngeschmacks,"Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts 94
(1979): 460-523.

2.   Marisa Mastroroberto, "Una visita di Nerone a Pompei: le
deversoriae tabernae di Moregine," in Storie da un'eruzione: Pompei,
Ercolano, Oplontis, eds. Antonio d'Ambrosio, Pier Giovanni Guzzo, and
Marisa Mastroroberto (Milan: Electa, 2003), 479-523.

3.   Marinella Lista, in Rosso Pompeiano: La decorazione pittorica
nelle collezioni del Museo di Napoli e a Pompei, eds. Maria Luisa Nava,
Rita Paris, and Rosanna Friggeri.  Roma, Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo
Massimo alle Terme, 20 dicembre 2007-31 marzo 2008 (Milan: Electa,
2007), 117-19.