We looked last time at the magnificent paintings in the Villa of Livia at Primaporta. And we talked about the fact that that was the quintessential second style wall. Because more then any other we saw it it was truly the wall as panorama as a vista into something that might lie beyond and we described in great detail the features of this particular painting. It's interesting that you wouldn't think that a gardenscape would be a good subject for third style Roman wall painting, a kind of painting that again respects the flatness of a wall and yet we do have examples of what we would term third style Roman wall painting showing the depiction of a gardenscape and I turn to that now. The painting that you look at is on the wall of the house of the Orchard, the Casa del Frutteto, in Pompeii. In the orchard, the so-called orchard cubiculum, and it dates to AD 25 to AD 50. So considerably, later, and it's interesting by the way, to note the chronology here, third-style Roman wall painting has a quite long life, because if we talk about it being used already in 20-10 BC at Oplontis and we're now looking at a house that could be as late as 50, might have been decorated as late as 50 AD that takes us, sixty or seventy years for this one style. So although I said there's cycles of fashion, fashion wasn't changing all that quickly. At this particular juncture. But here we see a gardenscape, in what we would call a third style wall. Now why do we call this a third style wall? It's divided into zones. We have a black socle down here. We have a zone here which seems to show a fence. A more substantial fence than we saw in the villa, the gardenscape of Livia. It does seem to support some marble vessels, or vases here. So you might, you should look at the bottom, you think well, maybe there is some suggestion of some space. In fact, if you look very carefully at the gateway of the fence, you can see that there is some attempt to represent it, as if it recedes in to depth. At least the doorway, so there's some attempt at that here. But if you look at this zone, I think you'll agree with me that the artists have once again, the painters have once again, respected the flatness of the wall. Yes there are columns here, but they are not substantial columns. They are attenuated columns, maybe not as attenuated as Boscotrecase but attenuated nonetheless. They do have capitals at the top, but as you walk into this room and look at them from a distance, they look like gold stripes on a flat back wall. And in fact, the fact that the wall was painted black is very significant, and not blue as we saw in the gardenscape of Livia at Primaporta. And look also, what's particularly interesting is the way in which the artist has positioned the trees within the frames of the columns. If you look very closely you will see that there isn't a single leaf that either overlaps the columns or that disappears behind the columns. They are completely contained, within those columns, they are represented very abstractly, very flat, and so because they are contained within those we get the impression not that we're looking at a gardenscape that is somehow viewed through a window behind the columns. But is it it's almost as if we're looking at a Japanese screen or something like that. It's a flat surface that has been decorated with depictions of trees not of you to look at trees that lie behind these columns. It's, it's very, it's really fascinatingly done I think and if we look at a detail of the wall in the Casa del Frutteto over here and of a tree, and a detail of a tree from Livia's Villa at Primaporta, I think we again see the differences between the two. Blue background, which gives us a sense of reality here; mountains in the background, as you'll remember, a black background here, gives a very different effect. Here, we talked about how the artist was a particularly good observer of nature. Had really gone out and looked at real trees. Had looked at the way in which leaves rustled in the breeze. Had looked at the way in which, again, light falls differently on leaves. You could, it can bathe them in light or it can bathe them in shadow. We looked at the very realistic way in which the artist depicted the birds who are in flight, and then alight on, a, on a leaf or a branch of the tree. Look at the difference here. The leaves are beautifully rendered, beautifully rendered, but they are rendered, they are all rendered essentially the same. You don’t have the same sense of the difference of light and shadow, you don't have this same sense, I mean you don't, these seem immutable not as if they could be ruffled by the breeze at all, immutable shapes. And look at the difference in the bird, who himself seem or herself, seems to be a shape against a black background you don't get this sense, there's no sense of movement as you see of the birds, as you see at the Villa of Livia at Primaporta. The bird is one shape among many shapes. The sinuous snake that makes its way up the tree. Has you know you have some sense again of this sort of teasing us here. There's some sense of depth. Because as it slithers all along here you get the sense that it is intertwining itself ,with ,with the trunk of the tree so that maybe there's a hint of, of of, some depth and some motion there so this is interesting play I think that the artist has, has created here. But on the whole this again is a painting that clearly respects all the tenants that have come to be from the point of view of these artists third style Roman wall painting even for a subject as as unlikely for this as a gardenscape. [COUGH] we have talked about third style Roman wall paintings in Campania. We have talked about the fact that a lot of it seems to be connected in some way to members of the imperial household. And we see the same also in Rome and it's to Rome that I would now like to turn and specifically to the golden house or the Domus Aurea of the Emperor Nero. I show you a view of the famous octagonal room of Nero's Domus Aurea It is one of the greatest rooms in Roman architecture. It's an octagonal room that has a large oculus that is made out of concrete, it has radiating alcoves and it is in a sense of grandiose version of the frigidarium that we saw in the Stabian and Forum Baths
at Pompeii. It is part of a very major architectural revolution under Nero It is extremely important. We'll talk about it in great detail, vis a vis the architecture, in a later lecture. But I do want to bring up just the, the, contextually it works better for me to talk about the paintings separately, and the paintings in connection to paintings in Pompeii. And it's to those paintings, that I'm going to turn [COUGH] now. The paintings in Nero's Domus Aurea, that we will see are both third and also fourth style Roman paintings. So once again, we seem to be in a situation where we are looking at a palace in this case commissioned by an imperial patron in which it looks like there was an important transition from one Roman decoration, one Roman wall painting decoration style to another in this case the third style to the fourth style. The Domus Aurea paintings are important for three major reasons. The first reason is we can date them exactly. We know that these paintings, both of the third and the fourth styles, were done in the Domus Aurea between 64 AD and 68 AD. We also know, and we know this very rarely, the name of the painter who was responsible for the third and fourth style painting in the Domus Aurea. His name is one you will, I hope you will, I, I'm not, hope, I know you will never forget because his name was Fabullus,F-a-b-u-l-l-u-s, Fabullus and he was indeed as you shall see truly fabulous. Fabullus is known from, we know him from the writings of Pliny. Many of you have probably read the writings of Pliny. Tells us a lot about art, ancient art and Pliny tells us that Fabullus was the painter for the Domus Aurea in Rome. And he tells us a couple of other interesting tidbits about Fabullus. He tells us that Fabullus always used to paint in a toga. Painting in a toga is like painting in a three piece suit, today. You wouldn't paint in a, you know, painting in a toga, it makes no sense to paint in a toga. But he obviously, whether he really painted in a toga, we don't know. But that was his reputation, which means he dressed up for the event, took it very seriously. We also know from Pliny that, or Pliny tells us that the Domus Aurea was Fabullus' Prison. Why was it Fabullus' prison? It was Fabullus' prison because any of you who have visited the Domus Aurea and those of you who haven't, I hope you will when you are in Rome, because it's an extraordinary place to see, will, will see that it is corridor after corridor after corridor after corridor and we only have today a very small piece of the Domus Aurea preserved. So if, if, if Fabullus' job was to paint all of the walls and all of the ceilings of the Domus Aurea, it would have indeed taken a lifetime, it would have indeed served as a kind of prison for him. I suppose later, it might be interesting to think of him in connection to, he was not as great as but he was in a sense the Michelangelo of his time. Think about Michelangelo and the Sistine ceiling and all the time that he devoted to, to painting that extraordinary space also in Rome. I show you a couple of views of the corridors. I'm not going to go into detail now on exactly why this is the case, but the Domus Aurea is now underground, it's subterranean. It was, it was raised to the ground, and covered over in part by a later Roman emperor that we'll talk about in the future. So if, when you visit it today, you need to go underground. It was buried for a long time and rediscovered in the renaissance and it's interesting because we know that the famous painter Raphael, the famous renaissance painter Raphael, went underground and was one of the first to see the paintings of the Domus Aurea because Raphael left a graffito on the wall which basically says Raphael was here. And we're fortunate that he left that because it tells us again that he was here and we're not surprised because this is a loggetta in the Vatican today that was designed by, it was painted by Raphael and you can see how much the paintings of the Domus Aurea were weathered obviously then the one on the left. But the painting of the Domus Aurea had a huge impact on Rafael. I'm going to show you three rooms in the Domus Aurea. The first is the, and I'm sorry I have to show you this to you in black and white. It's the only image. And it's very hard to photograph there. And it's of one of the, it's the only image I happen to have of this wall. But I am showing you a room called the Sala degli Uccelletti, which means the room of the birds. And like the other paintings I'm going to show you today, it dates to 64 to 68 AD. You can see that this is a third style Roman wall painting. It partakes of all the features that we've already described for third style Roman wall painting. It, it it, it has a flat wall as you can see here, it's not painted red or black, but in this case white which makes it even more delicate looking but it is definitely, they have definitely observe the integrity of the wall and painted it white. You can also see that the architectural members that there are are very attenuated and look like stripes on the wall from a distance. You can see that some of the frames are vegetal or floral, very delicate as you can see here, and then in the central panels, and it's the reason that it's called the Sala degli Uccelletti--, we have
little birds and those little birds float in the center of these panels, once again, a decorative motif among many. So the flatness of the wall observed a wall that is flat and to be decorated by the painter. But that's a Sala degli Uccelletti: third style. This is a vault in the Domus Aurea which is useful for us because here we can get a better sense of the color. Once again the background is white. And once again, the integrity of the wall has been respected. The artist has divided that wall into a series of panels but within those panels, we see once again sea creatures, in this case, floating in the center of those framed panels. We are meant to read them as frame panels, not as views into some other world. Note also that some of the frames are done with vegetal and floral floral, floral motifs. Very very delicate, very attractive, very ephemeral in a sense, very light, light weight against that white background. So very much again another example of third style Roman wall painting. But then there is this room and this room is room 78, and room 78 is extremely important for us because we see something else is happening in room 78. Yes, it does still have a white wall. Yes it does still use a floral decoration for some of the frames. Yes it does have framed panels, in this case not with black but with red frames as you can see here, all elements of the third style absolutely. So it partakes of a number of third style elements the white wall itself is very third style thing to do but you will notice of course that something new has happened here. And that is more substantial architecture has been or the representation of more substantial architecture has been reintroduced. If you look at these architectural elements that frame some of the panels you will see that we see once again real columns, real columns that seem to support projecting lintels. And then through those, once again a white background in this case, but through those we see other elements of architecture. Here a two storied columnar a ob a monument and over here what seems to be a broken triangular pediment supported by substantial columns. So architecture is, substantial architecture is reintroduced in the central zone flanking the panels on either side, but it is a different architecture then we've ever seen before because we never see a complete building, we see only fragments of buildings. This broken triangular pediment on it's own is an example of that. Fragments of buildings which we will see are depicted in what I would describe as illogical space. They don't look like they're actually, occupying space the way a regular building would or what is, in what is characteristic of the second style. But depicted, fragments of buildings depicted in a logical space. And then very important in the upper most zone we see a depiction of a number of these fragments of architecture, all jumbled together, almost to create a building. Although it isn't a building that actually works. I like to call these architectural cages, because they're, they are individual elements, individual fragments, again, that are grouped together. Architectural cages that often have in them very strange mythological and other creatures most of whom are very difficult, to identify today. So we see this incredible transition between the third style Roman wall painting that Fabullus is using for the Domus Aurea to something that is transitioning us into what we call the fourth style. In fact I would call this room a fourth style, Roman room, a fourth style painted room. And the genius behind this, I would speculate was Fabullus himself.
