Pompeii

by Mary Beard

  In a much more modest property close to the Forum on the Via dell’Abbondanza, now called the House of the Doctor (after some medical instruments found there), the wall between the columns of the small peristyle was covered with a frieze of pygmies. These were pictured getting up to all kinds of adventures, and into all kinds of scrapes: some attempting to catch a crocodile (Plate 22), one being eaten by a hippopotamus (while a friend vainly tries to pull him out of the creature’s mouth), a couple having sex in front of an admiring throng of pygmy revellers. But the most striking image is the scene which appears to depict a pygmy parody of the Judgement of Solomon, or some story on very much the same lines. Here a soldier is already wielding a large hatchet above the disputed baby, ready to cut it in half, while one of the claimant women, presumably its true mother, is pleading with three officials watching the scene from their raised dais (Ill. 49). If pygmies are not an unusual presence in various decorative schemes in the town (they have been found, for example, painted on the sides of the stone couches in one lavish outdoor triclinium, as well as in the House of the Ceii), the scene with the baby has no parallel elsewhere in Pompeii.

  49. In this painting pygmies play out the story of the Judgement of Solomon (or some very similar tale). The disputed baby lies on the table, ready to be cut in two. On the right, one of its competing ‘mothers’ pleads in front of a group of judges seated on a raised dais.

  Even so, for visual impact and intriguing subject matter, pride of place among friezes must go to the even more extraordinary series of paintings found in the Villa of the Mysteries (part working farm, part lavish domestic property), just over 400 metres outside the Herculaneum Gate. These now rival the Vettii’s Priapus as the iconic symbol of Pompeian art. They are reproduced on the same range of modern souvenirs, from ashtrays to fridge magnets – and have the added advantage that you don’t have to be quite so careful about who you give them to.

  Life-size figures, set against a rich red background, running around all four walls of a large room, almost enclosing the viewer in the painting, they are a stunning example of ‘saturation viewing’ (Ill. 50). At one end, the god Dionysus lounges in the lap of Ariadne, whom he rescued after she had been abandoned by the hero Theseus – itself a favourite theme of Pompeian painting. Around the other walls, we are faced with a curious array of humans, gods and animals: a naked boy reading from a papyrus roll (Plate 14); a woman bringing in a loaded tray turns to catch our eye; an elderly satyr plays a lyre; a female version of the god Pan (a ‘Panisca’) suckles a goat; a winged ‘demon’ whips a naked girl; another naked woman dances to castanets; a woman has her hair braided, while a winged Cupid holds up the mirror. And that is to pick out only about half of what is going on.

  To be honest, this is all completely baffling, and no amount of modern scholarship has ever managed to unravel the meaning – or, at least, not wholly convincingly. Some have argued that the images refer specifically to initiation into the religious cult of Dionysus. Note, for example, the flagellation, and the revelation of what might be a phallus on the end wall next to the divine couple. If so, then the room itself might have been some kind of sacred precinct within the house. This is not impossible, but it is certainly in no sense hidden away, as you might expect an esoteric cult room to be. In fact, it opens onto a shady portico, with a lovely view of the sea beyond; while on another side it has a large window looking onto the mountains in the distance. Others have seen the paintings as a rather extravagant allegory on marriage, and the young woman admiring herself in Cupid’s mirror as the bride. In which case, we are dealing with nothing specifically religious – but a perfectly plausible, if somewhat idiosyncratic, set of decorations for a major entertaining room. The house has been called the Villa of the Mysteries, after the Dionysiac ‘mysteries’ of initiation, following the strictly religious reading of the frieze. The truth is that these paintings are mysterious in the popular modern sense of the word too.

  50. The mysterious frieze of the Villa of the Mysteries. At the far end of the room the god Dionysus slumps in the lap of his lover Ariadne. On the left, opposite the large window, some of the figures that make up the procession are visible: a child reads from a scroll watched over by a seated woman, perhaps his mother. (See also Plate 14)

  Most Pompeian houses have now lost their sparkle – their interior decoration, as we have already noted, sadly faded, or worse. Only tantalising fragments survive of those caricatures in the baths of the House of the Menander (Ill. 51). We will never be able to recapture that Egyptian garden landscape in all its gaudy freshness, for – thanks to the combination of rain, sun, frost and an earthquake or two – it has simply disappeared since it was first uncovered in the early nineteenth century. Go to visit the house now, and you will find hardly any plaster left on the wall, and on what does remain it takes the eye of faith to make out more than a few vague blotches. All that we have comes courtesy of the energetic artists who worked in Pompeii in the years after its discovery, copying paintings for armchair archaeologists and aesthetes. It had already gone, it seems, by the 1860s.

  51. Parodies of the gods in the baths of the House of the Menander. This drawing of a now very faded painting shows a nasty little Cupid taking aim, under the instruction of a decidedly frumpish goddess of love.

  But there are nasty shocks of a different sort too. What makes the frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries so memorable is not just its curious subject matter. It is the completeness of the images that surround you, the luscious red background behind the figures and the glistening sheen of the paintwork. Here is one of the few places in the city where the full ancient experience of the painted walls seems to have been preserved.

  Sadly not. The fact is that this is no miraculous preservation, but the product of aggressive restoration after its excavation in April 1909. To be fair, what we now see may give roughly the right impression of the original. But the paintings were not in this perfect state when they were dug out of the ground, in a private-enterprise dig, by the local hotel keeper, and they were further damaged by the various strategies of conservation that followed. In the months after the discovery, these famous images were exposed to the elements, protected only by hanging cloths, which did nothing to prevent damage to the area above Dionysus in an earthquake in June 1909.

  A worse problem was the rising damp. From the moment they were exposed, salts rose from the ground and leached through the paintings, leaving nasty white patches. Starting only days after the discovery, these were removed with a mixture of wax and petroleum which was repeatedly applied to the surface. Hence not only that impressive sheen, which (even though some wax might have been applied in antiquity) is not itself ancient at all, but also the deep hue. A recent ‘excavation’ back to the Roman paintwork has revealed a distinctly lighter background colour. More radically, though it was standard practice at the time, stretches of the original walls of the room were demolished and replaced with damp-proof versions, the paintings being first detached from their original surface then reset into the new. All this had happened before a German team arrived in the autumn of 1909 to restore the frescoes, and to return them so far as possible to their pristine state.

  The Villa of the Mysteries is one house in Pompeii which does have a sparkle. But, despite its iconic status, that sparkle is not an ancient one. It is in large part the work of modern restorers.

  What went where

  When Cicero was buying sculpture to decorate his various houses and villas, he was very choosy about what went where. On one occasion in the 40s BCE, he wrote a cross letter to one of his friends who was acting as his agent. The unfortunate Marcus Fabius Gallus had, amongst other purchases, acquired a set of marble ‘Bacchantes’ – the female followers of the god Dionysus (or Bacchus), and a well-known symbol in the ancient world of wildness, intoxication and lack of restraint. They were, as Cicero admitted, ‘pretty little things’. But they were completely unsuitable for a (sober) library. A set of Muses, on the other hand, would have be
en just the ticket. And that was not the end of his complaints. Gallus had also come up with a statue of Mars, the god of war. ‘What good is that to me, the champion of peace,’ moaned the ungrateful Cicero.

  The logic of Cicero’s schemes for interior decoration is clear enough. The subject has to fit the function of the room, or the image he wants to present. Can we trace that, or some other, logic behind the decorative choices made in the houses of Pompeii? Amidst all the variety, can we begin to explain why any particular painting was chosen for any particular room?

  There must have been some element of personal whim involved. Whatever the precise meaning of the frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries (whether the sacred rites of Dionysus, an allegory of marriage, or any of the other bright ideas that scholars have come up with over the years), the whole ensemble is so lavish and distinctive that it points to a patron with strong views of what he wanted on the walls of this room, and the cash to pay for it. The same is true for the Alexander mosaic in the House of the Faun, a fabulously expensive installation, whether it was purpose-made for the spot, with its millions of tiny stone tesserae, or imported from the East. Someone very much wanted it to be there – though why, we cannot now hope to know. But decoration is not only a matter of personal whim. As we take for granted in our own world, there are cultural ‘rules’ which govern how houses are painted and decorated. Can we reconstruct those rules for Pompeii? And what do they tell us about life in the Roman town?

  These questions have exercised archaeologists for generations. One of the favourite suggested answers, first floated in the nineteenth century, is that fashion or changing taste lie at the root of the many different styles we see on the walls of the city. To put it another way, there is a chronological development in painting, with different styles indicating a different date for the decoration. It is especially the stereotypical ‘Pompeian’ manner of painting, with its broad washes of colour, its mythological scenes and architectural frames and fantasies, that has been scrutinised in this way. Archaeologists have tracked down various clues to the precise dating of individual paintings – whether hints offered by Vitruvius or those coin impressions made while the job was still wet (p. 15) – to reconstruct a complete design chronology. What looks to the untutored eye like a fairly homogeneous series of paintings can, so this argument goes, be divided into four distinct chronological styles, one succeeding the next in a fashion-conscious city. These are what are known in archaeological jargon (which regularly spills into guidebooks and museum labels) simply as the ‘Four Styles’, found not only in Pompeii but throughout Roman Italy.

  These styles are characterised by their different techniques of illusion, from the imitation blocks of coloured marble in the First Style to the sometimes baroque architectural confections of the Fourth. In between came the more solid architectural trompe l’oeil of the Second Style (often assumed to have been introduced to the town with the Roman colonists) and the delicate, decorative orna-mentalism of the Third, which reduced columns to mere stalks, pediments to twirls of foliage. Vitruvius, writing in the reign of the emperor Augustus, had no time at all for the then new-fangled Third Style, seeing it not just as unrealistic, but almost immoral: ‘How can a reed really support a roof or a candelabrum support gable ornaments? How can such a thin and pliant stalk carry a seated figure, or how can both flowers and half-length statues emerge from roots and shoots? Yet the people who look at these lies find no fault with them. On the contrary they like it, and they don’t pay any attention to whether any of it could actually exist ... No paintings should be sanctioned except those that obey the principles of authenticity.’ Had he lived to see it, the Fourth Style would have hardly appealed to him either. Ranging from relatively restrained compositions in white and red to breathtaking and sometimes frankly garish extravaganzas, it hardly displayed much concern for ‘authenticity’.

  Figure 11. Four Styles of wall decoration. Top left, (a) The First Style. Second century BCE. Top right, (b) The Second Style. In Pompeii this is usually dated to after the arrival of the Roman colonists in 80 BCE. Bottom left, (c)The Third Style. From the Augustan period (c. 15 BCE) to the mid first century CE. Bottom right, (d) The Fourth Style. The style of the final years of Pompeii, from the mid first century CE on.

  There is a lot to be said in favour of this model of chronological development in the house decoration of Pompeii. It is, after all, entirely plausible that Pompeian taste in interior design did change over time. Any modern builder who is used to working in old houses knows exactly what style of wallpaper to expect as he peels back the layers of the decoration that have been applied with each new fashion of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries. Why not the same sort of changes in Pompeii? In fact, there is plenty of evidence on the site that fits neatly with the idea of a progression of Four Styles. The vast majority – some 80 per cent – of the painted walls in Pompeii are done in Fourth Style, as you would expect for the latest in the chronological sequence. Besides, tentative as the dating of Pompeian structures and paintings often has to be, there is no evidence that a Fourth Style scheme was ever applied to a house wall before the middle of the first century CE.

  All the same, the fixation of some modern archaeologists with the Four Styles is much too rigid. True, any visitor to Pompeii in 79 CE would have found painting in the Fourth Style dominating the domestic landscape. But it goes without saying (because they are still there for us to see) that all the other styles were on show too. One house, known for obvious reasons as the House of the Four Styles, sported decoration from each of the Four Styles, perhaps the result of piecemeal decoration at different periods. The House of the Faun, as we have already seen, had preserved a large stretch of First Style decoration, in its strangely old-fashioned, almost museum-style environment, and had even applied it afresh on rebuilt walls. And there were a number of other splendid examples of First Style painting which had been carefully preserved, and no doubt retouched and repainted, right up to the end of the city’s life. It even seems that in public buildings (such as the Basilica in the Forum, a multi-purpose legal, political and commercial building) First Style decoration was in regular use long after it was the popular choice for domestic property. Pompeian decoration, both inside and outside the home, was a combination of old and new.

  What is more, as so often with such rigid schemes, the distinction between one style and the next is not quite so clear on the ground as the usual ‘type examples’ selected by most books (this one included) would suggest. Although a small band of archaeologists continue to work at refining the chronology and the stylistic categories, inventing more and more micro-subdivisions (Third Style Phase 1A, B, C, 2A etc.), the untutored eye may not be entirely wrong in suggesting that there are more similarities than differences in these styles. Generations of students have made their first visit to Pompeii, armed with book-learning about these stylistic divisions, only to discover, as I did myself years ago, that – distinctive though the First Style is – it is in most cases much harder to pinpoint the Second, Third and Fourth Styles than they had ever imagined. Even the specialists occasionally gesture at this problem, when they refer to the Fourth Style as ‘eclectic’, or ‘taking elements from what went before and putting them together in new and often unexpected ways’. One goes so far as to admit that the Fourth Style is ‘scarcely distinguishable from the Third’ – which leaves only the relatively few examples of First and Second as clearly distinctive.

  But the bigger problem is that the theory of the Four Styles pays almost no attention to the possibility of a link between the function of a room and the type of decoration on its wall. In the modern house, this is a powerful factor in design choice. Walk into an empty property today and there is fair chance that, even without the beds or wardrobe, you will be able to tell the main bedroom from the sitting room or the children’s room, relying only on the colour and patterns on the walls. And Cicero suggested that a similar concern with function might dictate a rich Roman’s choice of statuary. Does
the same thing apply in Pompeii, where – as we have already seen – household activities were rather less precisely tied to particular rooms or areas of the house than in our own domestic environment?

  Yes – or, at least, up to a point. The zebra stripe design is very obviously associated with the service quarters. It is true that there are one or two more upmarket rooms in the town decorated in this style, but by and large this was the cheap wall decoration slapped onto latrines, slave rooms, utility areas and corridors (the ancient equivalent of a quick coat of white emulsion). We have also seen that the walls of a garden would often be decorated with themes which picked up the idea of verdant foliage, and hinted at an imaginary wilderness (populated by beasts, pygmies and other exotic figures) stretching in the mind’s eye far beyond the confines of the house. It is significant too that those parodies of well-known myths, treated with all due seriousness in most other paintings in Pompeii, are found in a private bath suite. For baths were a place of pleasure where social norms were relaxed, as is signalled in the House of the Menander by the mosaic on the floor at the entrance to the ‘hot room’: a dashing and scantily clad black slave, garland on his head, carrying two water flasks which rhyme in colour and shape with his (large) penis; underneath an arrangement of four strigils (oil scrapers) and a jar on a chain which is also decidedly phallic (Ill. 52).

  But we can trace a few more-general links between the use of different areas of the house and the decoration on its walls, its colours and themes. In the modern Western home, pastel colours regularly signal bedrooms or bathrooms. In Pompeii, the householder often seems to have chosen black background paint for his grandest rooms, cheap though the basic ingredient of that paint could be (Pliny, interestingly, refers to various more-expensive black pigments, including one imported from India). Yellow and red were relatively high-status alternatives.