Now I don't want to leave you with the impression that because brick is now exposed for, and enjoyed in its own right that there are no walls that were stuccoed and painted in Ostia. That would be a mis, misconception, because there are still painted walls in Ostia. On the insides of some of these buildings, they still opted to stucco over the wall and to paint it. And I want to show you just one glorious example, the insula of the painted vaults, which dates to 150 to 200, is one that has one of our best preserved ceiling, walls and ceilings anywhere, in a Roman house. You can see how well preserved it is here, and it is what we call the spoked wheel effect, because what, the ceiling decoration does look like a spoked wheel. We can also see this division. In fact as you look at, it I think you'll be as struck as I am by the fact that as we look at this spoked wheel, we really get the sense that we're looking at one of Hadrian's pumpkin domes in paint, because you can see the segmented dome effect here, and also the octagonalized, in a sense the octagonal effect that one also gets from this structure, as well as the, the effect of the ribs of a groin vault, as you can see well here. But it's a painted version of a pumpkin dome. And it's not surprising to see that Hadrian's pumpkin domes took off in this way. I also just want to mention to you that while, there's a fair amount of post, what we call post Pompeian painting, Roman painting after AD 79, almost all of it is an exploitation of the fourth style of Roman painting as we know it from Pompeii. There's actually not as much invention as one would expect after 79 in Roman painting. I want to show you very briefly the Insula of the Muses, the Insula of the Muses in Ostia which dates to around A.D. 130 because this is one of the few single family dwellings that we see in the second century in Ostia. You can see if you look at the plan that it is arranged not around an atrium, but around a peristyle court here, although there aren't the columns, there are these, piers, as you can see also in plan. But just as we saw in the late Roman house, the late house, the late first-century A.D. houses in Herculaneum, from between the, [COUGH] the, [COUGH] the earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius. The triclinium has become the most important room in the house. You enter into it here. You have the vestibule, you have this court, and then you have, on axis, the triclinium of the house. But what makes this particular house most distinctive is the fact that every single floor is covered with mosaic. So as I said to you before, black and white mosaic reigned supreme in the city of Ostia. And it's clear that everyone who could afford it decorated their, every room of their house with mosaic. And although this doesn't come from this particular house, this comes from the house of Apuleius in Ostia, it's not on your monument list, you don't have to remember it, but I just wanted to show it to you because it's a marvelous example of what can be done. I wish it were a little more in focus, but it's a marvelous example of what could be done and was done using black and white mosaic in Ostia, only black and white tesserae, with a Medusa head in the center. And then if you, this is one of these examples, illusionistic examples, that as you look at it and focus on it, it's hard to tell exactly what's you know, what's in the foreground, what's in the background. It's got that, like an op art effect, that those of you who know Op Art of the 1960s and I show you an example of it, a painting from the Blaze series by the op artist Bridget Riley of the 1960s. I've, I've mentioned so many times in the course of this semester that there isn't anything that the Romans didn't do before anybody else, and this is a, an, an op art as an example of that. So we do see op-art in Ostia and we see it obviously also much later in more contemporary painting. Another bath structure in Ostia, this one the Baths of the Seven Wise Men or the Seven Sages dates to A.D. 130. I show it to you only to show you this one circular room, and not because it's a Bath building but rather because it has a wonderful mosaic on the floor. Again, a circular structure with a circular mosaic, once again, done in black and white. And if you look at this, you can see that what we have represented here, I'll show you a detail in a moment, is a flowering acanthus plant that has intertwined within its leaves hunters and the hunted, hunted animals and their hunters in combat, as you can see here. And here's a detail where you can see, once again done entirely in black and white mosaic, the hunters, the animals very carefully depicted, interspersed among these these flowering acanthis plants. Very effectively done. This is another view of the Baths of Neptune in Ostia, which we looked at before. Dates to 139 A.D. And this is a good view, because it shows you not only the brick face construction of these structures, but also the mosaics themselves and how every single room of this bath was covered with black and white mosaic. The pièce de résistance, the finest mosaic in the complex, is this one, and it's the one from which the bath gets its name, the Baths of Neptune, because we see Neptune himself in the center of the scene. It's not surprising that the that the god of the sea was chosen as an appropriate subject for a bath building. We see him here with his trident, that's how we know it's him. Being being carried along by four horses. He's holding the reins of those horses, his mantle is billowing up behind him. One expects to see a chariot here. One thinks of this as Neptune in a chariot, but it's not Neptune in a chariot. You can see that these horses, by the way, aren't fully horses, but are, the front part is a horse and the rest is a sea creature. And you can see that the legs of of Neptune are inters, are interwoven with the, with the tail of the sea creature. He's in fact using the tails of those sea creatures almost like you know, almost like skates or as he makes his way along this, or water skis, I guess, is a better way of putting it, water skis as he makes his way from right to left across the white background. One of the interesting things abut this mosaic is, you see the tension in the, in the minds and and, and, work of this, of this artist. In, in, on one had making these very abstract black shapes against a white background, but at the same time, paying a lot of attention to the actual musculature, to what the chest of the god Poseidon would have looked like as you look at this very pronounced musculature that's carefully done here by the artist. Here, our friends the dolphins, frolicking. Dolphins with cupids on their back, some fairly, other floating figures. A female figure on the back of another sea creature. All of this going on, on the floor of the Baths of Neptune. But what's particularly interesting, I think, is the same sort of thing in, that we saw in the Piazzale della Cooperazione, and that is that the artist has designed this in such a way that it doesn't matter which part of the room you're standing in. Wherever you are standing, you can look on to the floor from where you were standing and see at least some of the figures head on, whether you're standing here, whether you're standing here, whether you're standing up there, or to the right, you are always seeing some, not all, but some of the figures head on. So again, this is not, this is done with great care, and orchestrated to fit the space in which it was located. Here a detail of the mosaic that we just looked at showing Neptune and his horses and sea creatures.
