The Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  It was in the brothers’ interests to highlight as many Como sites as possible in Pliny’s letters to counter the claims of the Veronese. In constructing his museum on the supposed grounds of Caninius Rufus’ former estate, Paolo Giovio established a new Plinian landmark. When the building was finished in 1543 its walls were hung with hundreds of portraits of famous poets, scholars, politicians and artists. The portraits of the artists were a particular attraction. Paolo Giovio had read an early draft of Vasari’s (ultimately illustrated) Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects and urged its immediate publication before it could be illustrated.21 While it was not Paolo’s intention to divert readers from Vasari’s book, anyone who did want to look into the eyes of the most celebrated artists needed only to make their way to his Plinian museum. His magnificent building had views over the lake and a balcony to fish from in homage to one of the villas Pliny described in his letters.22

  Pliny had ‘many villas’ near Comum, including an undisclosed number inherited from his parents, but there were two firm favourites.23 Perched on a high ridge ‘overlooking the lake like the villas at Baiae’ (in the Bay of Naples) was ‘Tragedy’. It was elevated on a rock that divided two bays, and in a marvellous conceit it was said to resemble a pair of cothurni – calf-­hugging, heavy-­soled, lace-­up boots worn by actors when they performed Greek tragedies. Then there was ‘Comedy’, which curved around a single bay and sat low in its plot like a comic actor in his little socci slippers. It took some imagination to liken the two villas to footwear, not least because the theatre was not as popular in Pliny’s time as it once was, but whoever first named them might have taken his cue from the lake itself. Lake Como is shaped like a pair of splayed legs with two feet – or the thong of a sandal.24 Pliny extended both houses and endeavoured to make the most of their peculiarities. For once he let loose, indulging his fantasies of a spoiling otium (‘leisure’) and putting on a display worthy of the theatre itself. Throwing a line from a window of his low-­rise ‘Comedy’, he would sit and fish from his bedroom – ‘and practically even from the bed’.25

  Paolo Giovio liked to tell people that his museum stood on the site of one of these villas rather than Caninius Rufus’. His brother Benedetto, however, was anxious not to mislead.26 If he could only find evidence of where Pliny’s villas had really stood then the Veronese would have to concede defeat. Taking Pliny’s letters in his hands, Benedetto cast his eye over every ‘high ridge dividing two bays’ of the lake in the hope that he might still find Pliny’s ‘Tragedy’. While he had to admit there were rather a lot of bays, he could not help but notice one particularly prominent ridge overlooking the water. Positioned at the groin of the two legs of the lake, some hours from Como town, was Bellagio. Until recently it had been home to the palace of a courtier of Ludovico Sforza of Milan, but a fire had destroyed the building, leaving the expanse now occupied by the handsome gardens of Villa Serbelloni.27

  Benedetto began the steep ascent from the lakefront to these elevated grounds. This would have been a trying walk for Pliny, who, as Benedetto recalled, had ‘a slender frame that could not tolerate much exertion’, but he found its inhabitants insistent that the famous ‘Tragedy’ had once stood here.28 The steep hills of Bellagio offered an exquisite panoramic view of the three branches of the lake and the Alps beyond. Resting here, Benedetto was high enough up to watch the fishermen without being sprayed by their catch: the site seemed to match Pliny’s description. Although the historian could see nothing of the villa itself, he learned of the discovery of some pieces of stone inscribed with the name of one Marcus Plinius.29 Dated to the first or second century AD, these fragments, made from black Varenna marble, reveal that Marcus Plinius came from the same tribe as Pliny and was involved in the ‘administration of justice’ as a quattuorvir or local magistrate.30 He may have been no relation of Pliny, but clearly Bellagio was a desirable spot for the wealthy men of Comum to keep a home.

  A few decades after Benedetto surveyed the lake, a cartographer named Abraham Ortelius began to prepare what would be the first modern atlas. As he set about creating a map of Lake Como, he turned to the Giovio brothers and their recent scholarship. Depicting each and every mountain peak on the perimeters of the water, every town, village, and monument of interest, Ortelius marked Bellagio as the promontory where Pliny kept his villa called ‘Tragedy’.31 Benedetto’s ventures had not been in vain. The town of Torno, meanwhile, was identified merely as ‘Fons Plinianus’ (Pliny’s Spring), and ‘Comedy’ was situated at the town of Lenno.32 Looking at the finished map in Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum it is easy to imagine Pliny rowing leisurely from one to the other across the water. Ortelius’ drawing made it clear that, if Tragedy and Comedy were located at Bellagio and Lenno, then they had good views of one another across the lake, which would have been entirely appropriate to Pliny’s tastes and humour. Tragedy is the opposite of Comedy. Bellagio is opposite Lenno. As with so many features of his life, Pliny found his two villas all the more pleasant for the contrast between them. The contrast could only have been keener for the two villas being in sight of each other. With his seminal atlas Ortelius reinforced Pliny’s connection with Como.

  Benedetto Giovio’s Historiae Patriae, published posthumously the following century, remains one of the most elegant pieces of scholarship on the lives of the Plinys in Comum. Yet to be translated from the Latin and Italian, it is a testament to one man’s pride in his native town. In it he demolished the arguments of the Veronese, illuminating the errors of Jerome, Petrarch, Biondo and others, and used his knowledge of former Gaul to explain what Pliny the Elder meant when he called Catullus his ‘fellow countryman’. Together with his brother Paolo, he had done everything he could to re-­establish the place of the Plinys in Como’s history. To this day no trace of Tragedy or Comedy has been found, but Bellagio and Lenno remain for many scholars the most probable locations. Paolo’s lakeside museum no longer survives, but many of the antiquities and inscriptions he acquired were transferred to a palazzo formerly owned by his family. This palazzo is now home to Como’s Museo Civico. A plaque on the stairway commemorates the two brothers who invested so much in the lives of their ancient forebears.

  EIGHT

  Portrait of a Man

  He peered in front of him and right and left through the gloom and thought that those must be portraits. It was dark and silent and his eyes were weak and tired with tears so that he could not see. But he thought they were the portraits of the saints and great men of the order who were looking down on him silently as he passed . . .

  James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916

  Pliny bestowed many, many gifts upon Comum in his lifetime – 1.6 million sesterces’ worth in all. But there was one particular piece, a work of art purchased for the temple of Jupiter, about which he could not contain his excitement.1 Made of Corinthian bronze and cast in the shape of a naked, balding, sinewy old man, it was far from the most appealing sculpture ever to have been placed before a god, but that was precisely why Pliny liked it.* The bronze does not survive but similar art works do: there is a small terracotta figurine of a fat, middle-­aged bald man dressed in a toga from a similar date in the Giovio archaeological museum.

  Pliny was full of praise for the honesty of his new acquisition: ‘This is a statue that even I can understand. For it is nude, so cannot conceal any imperfections it may have or give too limited a display of its virtues. It represents an old man standing: his bones, muscles, sinews, veins and even his wrinkles are visible as if he were living and breathing. What hair he has is receding, his forehead is broad, his face drawn, his neck slender; his shoulders slope, his chest is slack, his stomach hollowed; from the back it gives the same picture of age.’2

  Pliny did not presume to know anything about art. In his description he was careful not to emulate the private collectors in Rome who were notorious for ‘feigning knowledge . . . so as to separate themselves from the masses, as opposed
to having any real understanding of the subject’, as Pliny the Elder sharply put it.3 It had become the particular mark of a pseud to sniff metal in the belief that authentic Corinthian bronze could be identified by scent.4 Petronius, Nero’s former ‘arbiter of excellence’, had written a satire in which a braggart freedman named Trimalchio claimed to prefer glassware to bronze as ‘it certainly does not smell’. The inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Trimalchio bores his guests with ludicrously inaccurate descriptions of Corinthian bronze having been formed by the melting of statues following ‘Hannibal’s sack of Troy’.5

  Pliny the Elder had dedicated practically an entire book of his encyclopaedia to the discussion of metal sculptures. He had described how bronze came to be preferred to wood and clay for representations of men as well as gods, and dated its introduction to Italy to Lucius Scipio’s treasure-­laden return to Rome after his victory in Asia Minor in the second century BC.6 Although these were the triumphal parades which were held responsible for the birth of luxury in Rome, Pliny the Elder’s initial disapproval of bronze had steadily been supplanted by an appreciation of its capacity to capture life. As far as he was aware, portraiture originated in Corinth in the seventh century BC when a girl used the light of a lamp to trace the shadow of her lover’s face on a wall before he left for overseas.7 Once she had produced the outline, her father, a potter named Butades, worked it up using clay so as to produce a novel portrait. The model was fired and provided the girl with something to remember her lover’s face by. Now that people had taken to casting portraits of their loved ones in the more valuable medium of bronze, Pliny the Elder feared that a time would come when ‘no one’s true likeness survived’.8 He claimed that the Romans had already taken to melting down bronze sculptures of their family members and adorning their homes with portraits of strangers instead.

  Pliny the Elder’s words proved in his own and his nephew’s case to be prescient. There is not a contemporary likeness of either Pliny to be found. However, a skull that has long been rumoured to be Pliny the Elder’s is currently undergoing investigation and could, potentially, be used to produce a three-­dimensional model of his head.9 The skull, which belonged to a man of the right sort of age to be Pliny the Elder, was excavated near the mouth of the river Sarno in the region of former Stabiae by an amateur archaeologist at the beginning of the twentieth century. During a series of privately funded digs, Gennaro Matrone uncovered a total of seventy-­three ancient human skeletons and an assortment of personal belongings, including oil lamps, jewellery, and a Roman gladius (dagger) with ivory sheath.10 The gladius is said to have been found beside a skeleton that lay apart from the others, with a skull resting on a nearby pillar; a collection of bracelets, three large rings, and a heavy neck chain formed of seventy-­five links, all in gold, was gathered around the torso.11 Matrone’s suggestion that these were the mortal remains of Pliny the Elder was met with ridicule by the archaeological establishment. The gladius and skull were bequeathed to the Museo Storico Nazionale dell’Arte Sanitaria in Rome, where they have remained ever since. The Italian press is optimistic that isotope analysis will confirm the identity of the skull, but experts remain rightly sceptical. The mandible that holds the teeth may even have come from another skeleton entirely.12 If someone did report to Pliny having seen his uncle’s body lying as if asleep on the day after the eruption, would he really have left him there without a tomb?

  Pliny the Elder might sooner have found his portrait reflected in his work and in his nephew than in his 2,000-­year-­old broken skull. The Romans liked to speak of their descendants inheriting not only their physical characteristics and family traits, but their passions, bad habits, and obsessions, too. As one man complained, ‘A fascination with actors and obsession with gladiators and horses . . . almost seem to be conceived in the mother’s womb.’13 Behind this humour lay a genuine belief in the propensity of flaws to be passed down. It is not going too far to see in such ideas an early understanding of the evolutionary basis of inherited characteristics that would later be expounded by Charles Darwin. A keen reader of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, of which he owned a ‘well skimmed’ translation, Darwin had joined the Plinian Society for collectors as a medical student at Edinburgh before eventually developing his theory of the inheritability of tendencies in The Descent of Man in 1871.14 Evoking the Romans, Darwin suggested that humans could inherit not only good habits, such as self-­control and virtue, but bad ones such as stealing as well.15

  The notion of the inheritability of good and bad qualities proved instructive for Pliny, who came to recognise sons in their fathers and even grandmothers in their granddaughters through their personalities more often than their faces. One day, he came by a terrible speech that had been copied out thousands of times and disseminated from Rome for public recital. It described the life of a boy who had died, but to hear it, said Pliny, ‘you would believe it was written by a boy, not about one’.16 Regulus had lost his son and composed an extended eulogy in his honour. Pliny had to admit that this was the one injustice Regulus did not deserve. The death of the boy might have prevented the superstitious lawyer from passing his cruelty on to future generations through his blood, but it was also a tragedy. The poet Martial, who enjoyed Regulus’ support, had praised ‘little Regulus’ for the love he showed his father. Pliny might have shown some humanity by paying a similar tribute. Instead he used the occasion to describe the boy as ‘sharp-­witted but flaky’.17 He followed Regulus’ mourning with a morbid fascination: the overblown eulogy, the portraits of the deceased cast in wax, bronze, silver, gold, ivory and marble, the funeral pyre piled high with his pet Gallic ponies and dogs, nightingales, parrots, the blackbirds slaughtered around it.18 ‘That was not grief,’ offered Pliny, his imagination fired by the scene, ‘but a display of grief.’ A son was little more than an underdeveloped portrait of his parents. Given time, ‘little Regulus’ would no doubt have proved himself his father’s son.

  Pliny’s mean-­heartedness over Regulus’ boy resounds in his letters because it was so at odds with the immense generosity he normally showed the younger generation. A considerable proportion of the 1.6 million sesterces Pliny bestowed upon Comum was directed towards the education of schoolboys and girls. Until a time came for him to have children of his own, he concentrated on instilling his virtues in the sons and daughters of his townspeople. Pliny took the long view, envisaging a time when Comum would be so famous for its scholarship and learning that families from all over Italy would seek to send their children to study there. If he oversaw the education of one generation then he might hope that they would grow up to produce intelligent children of their own.

  Pliny knew from experience where Comum fell short. He had received his own education there under a grammaticus (private tutor) before leaving for Rome while ‘barely a young adolescent’ to study under Nicetes Sacerdos, a well-­known Greek scholar from Smyrna (Izmir), and Quintilian, a professor of oratory who originally came from Spain.19 From these men Pliny would have learned how malleable young minds can be. As Quintilian said, children took to learning ‘as naturally as birds take to flight, horses to the racecourse, and wild beasts to savagery’.20 Pliny reasoned that if he could only provide a fuller education for the children of Comum on their home soil then they would be more willing to stay there and enhance its position and reputation within Italy in the future.21

  Pliny had been left unimpressed, also, by the youths he saw employed by the Court of One Hundred. Writers had in recent years voiced their concerns over a general decline in educational standards. Wistful for the old days, when boys had accompanied their fathers to the courts to learn oratory first hand, they despaired at the increasing irrelevance of the curriculum.22 Pupils often now engaged in practice debates on topics drawn from Greek tragedy, and while these were often very dynamic, it was sometimes difficult to see what application arguments about tyrannicide or the ethics of Greek burial could have to everyday life in Rome. As a consequence
of this kind of training, oratory was said to have lost its force and seriousness. At the beginning of the Satyricon, Nero’s former ‘arbiter of elegance’ Petronius has his narrator observe how young men enter the courtroom only to find themselves in a totally different world from the one they had been prepared for:

  And so I believe that young men turn into complete idiots in the rhetoric schools because they neither hear nor see anything that’s useful; instead they hear of pirates standing enchained on the shore, of tyrants writing edicts impelling their sons to chop off their fathers’ heads, of oracles given in times of plague encouraging three or more virgins to be sacrificed, of little honey-­dipped balls of words – all that’s said and done as good as sprinkled in poppy and sesame seeds.23

  Pliny seems to have viewed his wealth and standing as an opportunity to hone a new and improved generation. A chance encounter with a local boy provided him with all the impetus he needed to lay the first foundations in this venture. The unfortunate boy was having to travel all the way to Mediolanum to study because there was such a shortage of teachers in Comum. Since he did ‘not yet’ have any children of his own, Pliny kindly proposed to pay a third of whatever sum the boy’s father could raise to employ a new teacher for the town. He likened his contribution to one he would make ‘on behalf of a daughter or mother’, by which he meant that it would not be so large that he would miss it were it to be misdirected, ‘as I’ve seen happen in many places in which teachers are paid from public funds’. While he cast around for a suitable candidate – and called upon the ever resourceful Tacitus to help him find one – he arranged for all the parents of Comum to pool their funds with his, ‘for those who are, perhaps, forgetful with other people’s money are certainly careful with their own’.24