HSAR 252 - Lecture 5 - Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Houses and Villas at Pompeii

Chapter 1. Introduction and the Ideal Domus Italica [00:00:00]

Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Good morning. As you can see, the title of today’s lecture is
“Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Houses and Villas at Pompeii.” We spoke last time about the
public architecture of Pompeii, about the forum, about the temples, about the basilica, about
the baths, and also about shops, and tombs as well. But today we’re going to turn to the
residential architecture of Pompeii; residential architecture that is extremely important, not only
for what it tells us about Pompeii, but what it also tells us about domestic architecture in the
first centuries B.C. and the first century A.D., because there is no place where the houses are
better preserved than at Pompeii. So it tells us again, not just about the city itself, but also about
residential architecture in Rome, where we have very few examples, and elsewhere in the
Roman world.

I want to begin with the image that you see now on the screen, which is a building–and we’re
talking about the one at the left, front left–a building that is on one of Pompeii’s main
thoroughfares, the Via dell’Abbondanza, the Via dell’Abbondanza, the Street of Abundance. And
the building in question is relatively well preserved, and what is significant about it for us right
now is the fact that it is two-storied, as you can see here. What we’ll see in the course of today’s
presentation is that most of the buildings, most of the houses, in early Pompeii, are single-story
dwellings, but here we see one that is two-storied. And this two-storied dwelling actually dates
fairly late in the history of residential architecture in Pompeii. It dates sometime between the
earthquake of 62 and the eruption of Vesuvius of 79; so between 62 and 79 A.D.

And we see that it has two stories, in this instance. A story down below that may have been–that
says has entranceways, might even have been opened up as a shop, and then a second story that
is very interesting indeed. And it has what we call cenaculae, c-e-n-a-c-u-l-a-e, cenaculae, which
are second-story dining rooms that have open panoramic windows, these windows, as you can
see, through columns. So an interesting nod to Hellenization once again, this idea of
incorporating Greek elements into Roman architecture – elements that again are under- that
come into Roman architecture through the influence of earlier Greek architecture, and views out
through those columns. So two important points: one, that these have two stories, and that
adding a second story to a Roman building, or a Pompeian building in this instance, doesn’t
occur until between the earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius; and secondarily, this idea of
the picture window. And we’ve talked about the importance for the Romans of vista and
panorama, and they’re doing it here. They’re opening up that second floor so that you can sit in
one of these dining rooms and then have a very nice view out through the columns of the street
and the street life below.
Now this building, on the Via dell’Abbondanza, lies at the end of the development of Pompeian
domestic architecture. And so what I’m going to do is take us back to the beginning and trace
Pompeian domestic architecture from the Samnite period up through the eruption of Vesuvius.
With regard to the earliest houses at Pompeii, these were done during again the Samnite period,
the fourth and third centuries B.C. Keep in mind that the Samnites were an Italic tribe, that is,
indigenous to Italy from way back when–I had mentioned to you that Pompeii was founded
already in the eighth century B.C. And these Italic tribes built houses, obviously, in which they
lived already in the fourth and third – substantial houses – in which they lived already in the
fourth and third centuries B.C.

I want to begin our conversation about domestic architecture in Pompeii, and by extension in
Rome itself, with the so-called domus italica. What was the domus italica? The domus italica was
an ideal Roman house plan, and we know quite a bit about it because of the writings of
Vitruvius. Vitruvius – not to be confused with Vesuvius – Vitruvius was an architectural
theoretician who was writing in the age of Augustus, Augustus being Rome’s first emperor. And
Vitruvius left a great deal of writings about all kinds of architecture, including domestic
architecture, and he talks in detail about the domus italica or what he considered the ideal
Roman house, and he describes all of its parts. And through his writings we can explore together
what the ideal Roman house was, and what you’re going to find very interesting, I believe, is the
fact that the actual houses at Pompeii conform, or the earliest houses, conform very closely to
this ideal plan.

Let’s run through it together, both in plan and in restored view. Again I’m going to need to go
over a lot of terminology here, but I guarantee you I’m going to repeat it enough today that it
will be indelibly marked on your minds and you won’t even have to–I don’t think you’ll even
have to study this, when the time comes, because you’re going to know these parts of the
houses so well after we go through them today. Here you see the plan of the typical domus
italica. You can see at number 1 is the entrance into the house. The entrance to the house was
called the fauces, f-a-u-c-e-s; the fauces or the throat of the house. Sometimes the fauces had
before it a vestibule, called a vestibulum–and all of these words are on the Monument List for
you–a vestibulum, which was a place right before the beginning of the fauces, underneath the
eaves of the house, where you could actually stand, get in from the rain in case it was raining
outside, while you waited for the door to be opened. But in these very early domus italica
houses, we don’t tend to see the vestibulum. So think it away for the moment, just the fauces or
throat of the house.
Then on either side of the fauces there are two rooms, which are called cells or cellae: cella in
the singular and cellae, c-e-l-l-a-e in the plural. These can be treated in a number of different
ways. They can either be closed off from the street and used as interior rooms for the house,
extra bedrooms or living spaces, or they can be, as you see them in this ideal plan, opened up to
the street. When they are opened up to the street they take on the role of shops or tabernae, t-
a-b-e-r-n-a-e, shops or tabernae. And those shops could be either used by those who owned the
house, to make additional money, or they could be leased out to others for their shops. You see
the fauces leads into the most important room of a Roman house, the so-called atrium, the
famous atrium of the Roman house, a-t-r-i-u-m. The atrium was the audience hall of the house.
And it’s important to mention from the outset that Roman houses had a very different role in
Roman society than houses do for us today. We tend to think of our houses today in large parts
as retreats, as places we can get away from it all – get away from work, get away from
schoolwork and so on, and escape. Although we do enjoy obviously having friends and family
visit us there, we tend to think of it as a place of retreat.

This was not true in Roman times, when the house was also a place to do some very serious
business. The man of the house, the head of the household, the paterfamilias, often greeted
clients in the atrium of the house, and when he was away on business, or away at war, his wife,
the materfamilias, would stand in for him and she would conduct business in the atrium. So
considered a very public part of the house, a place where you wanted it to look its best because
you were going to be greeting important visitors there, to do business. So the atrium is located
here. You can see this rectangular pool in the center of the atrium. That is the impluvium–and
you have that on the Monument List–the impluvium of the house, which is a pool in which they
collected rain water for daily use. How did they collect that rain water? Because there was an
opening in the ceiling, also rectangular in shape. That’s called a compluvium, and the
compluvium had surrounding it a slanted roof to encourage the water obviously to slide in
through the compluvium and land in the impluvium down below.

Around the atrium and also around the impluvium, at 4 here, are the bedrooms of the house,
the cubiculum, in the singular, and cubicula, in the plural: the cubicula or bedrooms of the
house. And you can see that each one of them opens up off the atrium. They are very small in
size, smaller than any other rooms in the house, and they were literally just a place to sleep.
They were very small, mostly very dark. Some of them had slit windows. I’ll show you one of
those later. Many of them didn’t have any windows, they were literally just sleeping spaces. Over
here, at 5, we see the wings or the alae, a-l-a-e–the wings or the alae, ala in the singular–alae of
the house. The wings of the house were a very important place from the point of view of family
tradition and religious practice and so on. It was the place where the Romans kept the shrines of
their ancestors. They had wooden shrines–they were usually made out of wood–with doors, and
they kept inside those the busts and portraits of their ancestors, and they would take those out,
they would open those shrines up and take those out on special occasions, usually anniversaries
marking the anniversary of the death of the deceased. And they had an interesting practice in
which the member of the family who most closely resembled the deceased in size and general
appearance would put on that mask and participate in a kind of parade in honor of the dead. So
they kept those in those shrines, in the wings or the alae of the house.

Here at 6 on axis–and we know how much the Romans liked axiality as well as symmetry–we see
the room over here, at 6, is on axis with the fauces and the atrium. This room is called the
tablinum, t-a-b-l-i-n-u-m, the tablinum, which started as the master bedroom of the house, the
most important bedroom, much larger than the cubicula, but over time it became a place where
the family archives were kept. And beyond that–and we’ll see it happening pretty early actually
today–it becomes almost a kind of passageway between the atrium and the area that lay beyond
here. At 7 we see also a fairly large room, the dining room or triclinium, and you can see in this
case, in the ideal Roman house, it opens off the atrium; so easy to get to from the atrium. And
then at the back, number 8, for one of these ideal Roman houses, the hortus, h-o-r-t-u-s, or the
garden of the house, which was obviously open to the sky.

If you look at the restored view, you can see how these earliest houses really had a very enclosed
feeling. They were quite stark and geometrically ordered, with very few openings. You can see, in
this case, this one opening as an entranceway into the fauces, as well as into two shops, as you
can see here. And then, of course, the compluvium, a hole in the ceiling, and then the hortus is
open to the sky. But, other than that, there are no windows whatsoever. It’s a very enclosed
structure. And we’re going to see that although that’s the case in the beginning that changes
over time; we’ll see a very important and interesting evolution.

Now another point that I want to make from the start is just as in temple architecture, and we’ve
traced the development of early Roman temple architecture, where we saw the Romans
ultimately using–combining an Etruscan plan with a Greek elevation. We’re going to see
something actually quite similar happening in the development of Pompeian and Roman
domestic architecture. We’re going to see that Etruscan, earlier Etruscan monuments, had an
impact. And I show you a plan of an Etruscan tomb over here–we’ve looked at this before–an
Etruscan tomb over here, just to show you that the general arrangement of that tomb, with an
entranceway here, with two rooms over here, kind of like the tabernae that we looked at, or the
cells that we looked at just before. A big space over here, not unlike the atrium. The idea of
axiality: entering into it, then this large space, then another space which mirrors the tablinum or
is like the tablinum of the Roman house, and then other rooms on either side. So this whole idea
of this progression of one space, an axial progression of one space to another space to another
space that’s on the same axial focus; very important, and I think those who were building these
fairly early on, the Samnites and so on, were clearly looking at Etruscan examples.

And it shows us, very early on also, that in the minds of the Romans there was a very close
association between the houses of the living and the houses of the dead. Because if you look at
the inside of this Etruscan tomb–and I mention it; I’m not holding you responsible for it, but I
mention it to you underneath the domus italica on the Monument List. This is the Tomb of the
Shields and Seats in Cerveteri of the sixth century B.C. And if you look at it, you can see that
inside the tomb–it’s all carved from the rock, from the tufa rock–you can see that it looks very
much like what you’d expect a house to look like, with beds. And notice the detail. They’ve even
provided–it’s all done in stone, the tufa stone – but you see they’ve even provided stone pillows
here, not very comfortable, but it gives you the sense of what a house would’ve been like. And
we know that beds in houses looked very much these. Over here a throne, with a nice footstool,
as you can see. And then if you look very carefully, also indicated in stone, the rafters, the beams
done in stone. And then the moldings around the door and around the shields, which is the
reason this is called the shields and the seats obviously is because it has seats and it has shields
on the wall. So I just wanted to make the point, because it’ll turn up a number of times in the
course of the semester, the close association in the minds of the Romans between houses of the
living and houses of the dead, and also that important point that the early Samnite builders are
looking at Etruscan prototypes.

Chapter 2. Early Pompeian Houses and the Ideal Hellenized Domus [00:15:28]

I want to show you now the way in which actual Pompeian houses conform very closely–the
early ones at least, of the fourth and third centuries B.C.–conform very closely to this domus
italica ideal plan. I want to begin with the so-called House of the Surgeon in Pompeii, which
dates to the third century B.C. And it’s called the House of the Surgeon because of all the surgical
instruments that were found in the house, and I show you the array of them now on the screen.
This should be of considerable interest, to especially–and I know there are a number of you in
here – students whose major is biology. And I want to mention also that you might be surprised
to hear–but maybe not, Yale has such amazing collections–that the Medical School has a
collection of surgical instruments that goes way back, and it goes way back to ancient Rome. You
can actually see ancient Roman surgical instruments in that collection that we have here at Yale,
not perhaps as many as this, but an interesting selection, and those of you who are in that field
might at one point want to take advantage of that and get to see them firsthand. So this house
got its name from this cache of surgical instruments that were found inside. That probably gives
us some sense of the profession of at least one of the people who was living here.

I show you the plan of the House of the Surgeon, and you’ll see a version on your Monument List
that actually has the rooms designated there, which I don’t have here. So that will be helpful to
you as you–I wanted you to have that version so that you, when you’re studying, you have that
before you. And in any exam, by the way, even if I show something slightly different in class, I will
show you only what is on your Monument List in the exam. So those are the ones that you
should study and remember. But you’ll see the plan is exactly the same. It just doesn’t have the
labels here. So we can see that it conforms, the House of the Surgeon, third century B.C., to the
ideal domus italica plan.

You enter here; you enter into the fauces or throat of the house. There are two cells, one on
either side. It’s very clear in plan that this cell is closed to the outside and opens only off the
atrium, so used by the family for their own purposes. This one is open to the street, clearly used
as a shop, either by this family, or they’ve leased it out to somebody else. The atrium is on axis
with the fauces. We can see that the atrium has a pool, a rectangular pool, or impluvium; and
there would’ve been a compluvium up above. On either side the cubicula or bedrooms of the
house, opening off the atrium. Over here the wings or alae of the house, for the ancestral
shrines. Over here, again, a dining room, a triclinium, that opens off the atrium. Up here we
think probably a portico, one column or two, but that might belong to a later renovation, and I’ll
explain why in a moment. And then in the back a somewhat irregularly shaped hortus or garden.
But I think you can see from this example how closely these actual houses track the domus
italica described by Vitruvius.

Another example of one of these early Roman houses that conforms to the domus italica type is
the so-called House of Sallust in Pompeii that dates to the third century B.C. This is another
house that has the domus italica as its core. But, just like most of the houses in Pompeii–you’ll
remember how when the Romans took over Pompeii in 80, or made Pompeii a Roman colony,
they tossed the Samnites out of their homes, they took them over, and of course once they took
them over, they renovated them. So there’s quite a bit of renovation that takes place to some of
these early Samnite houses. In this case the House of Sallust seems to be an example of that.

But we still see the original core of the domus italica. The entrance over here into the fauces of
the house; I’ll say something about that in a moment. The atrium on axis with that, with the
impluvium. The cubicula over here. The alae or wings here. The tablinum of the house over here.
In this case you can see that the triclinium opens up off toward the hortus instead. This family
wanted to provide views of the hortus rather than the atrium, from the dining hall. Now what’s
particularly interesting, and may belong to the renovation, are the shops that are opening up off
the street. Because you can tell in plan exactly how this shop was used. Anyone volunteer to say,
based on the plan? What kind of a shop was this?
Student: Fast-food restaurant.

Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner: A fast-food store. Yes it’s a fast-food shop, a thermopolium,
because we can see the counter and we can see the recesses in plan. So this family either had, or
let its space out, for one of these thermopolia, for one of these fast-food stands in the front of
their house. So two examples, the House of the Surgeon and the House of Sallust, that conform
closely, third century B.C., to the original domus italica plan.

In the second century B.C. we see something happen in house design, quite extraordinary, and
that is linked to the same kind of development we saw in temple architecture, and that is yes,
they’ve been looking at the Etruscan type of plan, they’ve been conforming to that to a certain
extent. All of a sudden in the second century they get the bug to make their houses look more
Greek, and they begin to incorporate elements that they take from earlier Greek architecture,
and the result is quite extraordinary. I’m showing you here an example of an ideal plan of what
we call the Hellenized domus, the domus that has been Hellenized, that has been given Greek–it
has been enhanced with Greek elements. And let’s run through the plan again, of the so-called
Hellenized domus type.

You can see that the core is the same as the domus italica. You enter over here. Here we can see
in plan the incorporation of the vestibulum, this vestibule that is located right in front of, or at
the beginning of the fauces, the purpose of which–you can see it right here–the purpose of
which, you kind of entered into the house. The roof of the house protects you in case the
weather is not good, but you still have to stand in that vestibule until you’re allowed into the
fauces and the rest of the house. So we see here the vestibulum, the fauces, the two cells,
cellae, one on either side, in this case they are not opened up as shops. The atrium here, with its
impluvium, to catch rain water. At 4, we have the usual cubicula, or bedrooms. At 5, we have the
usual alae or wings. And then 6, the tablinum on axis with 7, the triclinium opening off the
atrium. So once again the core of the original domus italica, very much intact in the Hellenized
domus.

But look what’s happened up here. What’s happened up here is at number 8, under the
influence of Greek architecture, under the influence of what’s happening in temple architecture,
they incorporate columns into the interior of the house, and they place their garden here. It’s a
garden court, with columns, which technically is called a peristyle, p-e-r-i-s-t-y-l-e. And it is
comparable to what we see in temple architecture when we saw the architects giving some of
the temples–the peripteral colonnade; do you remember the colonnade that goes all the way
around and is freestanding, under the influence of Greek architecture? It’s the same sort of thing
here, except it’s on the inside of the building. So this peristyle court cum garden, located right
here. And then on either side, additional bedrooms or cubicula; these were probably very
desirable, to have a bedroom that opened, had a nice view out over your garden. And then back
here two additional triclinia, two additional dining rooms, to take advantage of the beautiful
views that one could get, if one could see it – probably not terribly much through these narrow
doorways, but at least opening up onto the peristyle court. One second. We see up here the
restored view, showing the same, the entranceway. And look here, you can even see columns
added in the front to announce, from the very start, that this is a house that is owned by a very
cultured individual, who knows his Greek, and knows his Greek culture, and knows to
incorporate these Greek elements into his house. Then we see the compluvium. We see the
peristyle from above; you can see, open to the sky with columns, but still very stark, very plain
on the outside. No windows to speak of, very much an enclosed space.

Student: I was just wondering–I always like looking around–where the food preparation would
take place?

Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: Some of these houses did have kitchens, and I’ll show you an
example in a moment. Probably more of them did than we’re sure of. It’s just a question of what
remains, in terms of being able to determine that. But we certainly have examples of that. So
they did seem to have kitchens.

Chapter 3. Hellenized Houses in Pompeii [00:25:07]

So now I want to show you some examples of houses that conform to the Hellenized domus
type, this being the first one. It’s one of the most famous houses in Pompeii, and if you’re going
there anytime soon and are making a list of must-sees, this is one of those must-sees, in
Pompeii, the House of the Vettii. We think it belongs, although we’re not absolutely sure, to the
Vettius brothers, to the Vettius brothers in Pompeii. And it dates, as the Monument List
indicates, to the second century B.C. and later. Looking at this plan you can see the way in which
it conforms to the Hellenized domus type. Once again it has the core, it has the domus italica
core. The entranceway over here, with the fauces; the cells on either side, in this case used as
rooms internal to the house, they do not open off the street as shops; the atrium here, with the
impluvium; a smaller number of cubicula on either side; alae over here. Look what has
happened to the tablinum. The tablinum is gone essentially. All it consists of is a couple of
pilasters that are located right here–and I’ll show them to you in a moment because it’s well-
preserved pilasters here.
So the tablinum has essentially disappeared. It’s become a kind of passageway from the core of
the house into the garden. And it is a peristyle garden, surrounded by columns, as you can see.
And you can see how important that peristyle garden has become. This family has decided to
decrease their other space in order to have this stupendously large garden here. And they have
also put a very large dining hall, triclinium up here, that opens off the peristyle, and it has a
much bigger opening so that they could clearly dine and get views of this garden, this peristyle
garden, of which they were obviously incredibly proud. So some major changes there. Now this
particular house–oh I did want to say though, despite those changes, the house is still very
enclosed and very plain and stark from the outside. This is a restored view of what we believe
the outside looked like. So geometrically ordered, cubic, as you can see. Just one entranceway,
possibly a few small windows, possibly not. And then you can see the compluvium and the
peristyle court. But otherwise very much enclosed, like the earlier domus italica; not much
change with regard to how the exterior of the building is treated.

This again is one of the reasons everyone flocks to this house is it’s very well preserved. There’s
been some restoration work, of course, but really this is one of those must-sees, because it really
gives you as good a sense as anything of what these houses looked like in antiquity. We have
obviously entered into–we’ve come through the fauces. We are standing in the atrium. We can
see the pool or impluvium here. We can see the compluvium, very well preserved, up above. I
think it’s probably the best preserved compluvium that we have, or close to it. And you can see
that there were little antefixes added in terracotta and stuff, as decoration, up at the top. As
we’re standing here we look back through what was once the tablinum, and now is basically a
point of transition, a passageway from the atrium to the most important part of the house, from
the point of view of these patrons, the garden. So you’re looking through. You see these great
piers on either side, that are all that’s left of the tablinum. You look through that and you see the
garden. The garden has its columns surrounding it. The walls are painted, of that garden, all a
very lively and wonderful interior.

And what also becomes very clear in looking at this particular view is something that we’ve
already discussed, and that is the importance in the minds of the Romans of vista or panorama,
of great views that you can see from one part of a building to another. Remember the Sanctuary
of Jupiter Anxur at Terracina and all of those wonderful lateral and axial entrances and exits,
where there were all kinds of interesting light effects. We see the same sort of thing here. The
idea is to pass from a particularly well-lighted area outside into a darker area, the fauces. Then a
little bit more light added to the system through the compluvium, and then a whole host of light,
that you can see in the distance, through the open–because of the open peristyle. So dark, light,
dark, light – this progression of space, this progression of light through the structure a very
typical Roman thing to do. The other thing, of course, is this emphasis on axiality, this movement
through a structure in a very axial way.

The garden here, as it looks today. It would’ve been, of course, even more beautiful in antiquity,
when it would’ve been in better shape. But nonetheless, this gives you–it’s a bit overgrown now
and so on–but it gives you some sense of what it would’ve looked like, with the greenery in the
garden, surrounded by the columns, with garden furniture, little fountains, little marble
fountains and the like, and with the walls–the paintings are not in very good shape today, but
imagine them more vibrant. And I’m going to show you examples of that on Thursday and next
week, of some of the paintings that are in better condition and how vibrant this would’ve been
with those paintings. Look also at the columns because you can see–we’ll see that some of these
columns are made out of stone, some of them are made out of those tiles, that look like bricks,
that I’ve shown you before. But in all cases they were stuccoed over white. Why were they
stuccoed over white? To make them look like Greek marble. So once again, this Hellenization of
Roman domestic architecture, this attempt to make these things look as Greek as possible.

You asked about the kitchen. Well this is our best preserved kitchen, from Pompeii. It’s really
quite amazing. There’s a stove, and the pots and pans that were clearly still sitting on the stove
at the time this particular family had to flee from Vesuvius. And I neglected to show you, but you
can look at the Monument List for this plan, where the rooms are marked. You will see the
kitchen marked on that plan. And you will also see what’s called the Women’s Quarters, marked
on that plan, which was probably where some of the slaves who were owned by this particular
family, the Vettius brothers, lived, in that area.

Another example of a house that conforms, a Pompeian house that conforms to the Hellenized
domus type is the one that you now see on the screen. It’s a plan of the House of the Silver
Wedding, in Pompeii. We believe it was remodeled in the first century B.C., although it’s
controversial. It might have been remodeled a bit later in the first century A.D. It’s an interesting
structure. It got its name, the House of the Silver Wedding, because there was a lot of fanfare in
the late nineteenth century–I think it was precisely 1893–when the king and queen of Italy came
to visit this particular house, and it became their favorite. And so the Silver Wedding is actually a
reference to them and to their marriage, and so on and so forth.

It’s a wonderful house, and I think you can see how it conforms. Again, it has a core that is very
much the domus italica core, but it is another example of one of these houses that has been
remodeled because of the owner’s interest in Hellenizing that house. We enter here through the
fauces. There are cells on either side, opening off the fauces. It’s an unusual arrangement. Then
over here the atrium with the impluvium; the cubicula on either side; the alae or wings of the
house; a dining room over here; two peristyle courts, one in the back, a smaller one, and then a
huge peristyle court over here on the left-hand side. So for this family one was not enough, they
wanted double the garden space, and they’ve allotted a lot of space in this house to those
gardens. Then, most interesting of all I think about this house, and the reason I chose it to show
to you, is that we are starting to see the Hellenization of the atrium as well. Because look what’s
happened to the atrium. They have placed four columns around the impluvium, in the atrium. So
it wasn’t enough to have these two large peristyles, they wanted columns everywhere, and they
placed these four around the impluvium. An atrium that has four columns in it is technically
called–and I put it on the Monument List for you–a tetrastyle atrium; this is a tetrastyle atrium.

Even that wasn’t enough. Look at that room in the upper left. That room in the upper left is a
banqueting hall, an additional dining space, but a special dining space, that you can see opens
up very nicely off the smaller peristyle of the house. The opening is fairly wide, so it probably
would’ve had some wonderful views of the peristyle garden. And look, there are four columns in
there as well. And this particular banqueting hall, its technical name–it’s got a kind of a funny
name that I don’t think you’ll forget called an oecus, o-e-c-u-s; and it’s even more amusing in the
plural, because the plural is o-e-c-i, oeci. So this is an oecus, among oeci, an oecus up there. And
you can see that it’s an oecus that has four columns in it; so we call it a tetrastyle oecus.

All right, so now that we’ve had an opportunity to look at the plan of the House of the Silver
Wedding, I want to give you a sense of what the building looks like today. It’s not as well
preserved as the House of the Vettii, but we can get a very good sense of what it was like in
antiquity. And the oecus, which in some respects is the most important room in the house, from
our standpoint, is very well preserved. We’re looking here at a view. We’re standing again in the
beginning of the atrium, looking through the atrium. We see the impluvium of the house – a lot
of moss and some–it’s overgrown today. But nonetheless you can see it there, as well as the
compluvium above. What’s most important to us is you can see that this is indeed a tetrastyle
atrium, with four columns that are surrounding the impluvium, those columns supporting the
ceiling, and of course the compluvium above. Also interesting is the way in which the columns
are treated. You can see that they have been fluted and then stuccoed over. Do you remember
the temple at Cori, that we looked at, where we talked about the fact that–the Temple of
Hercules at Cori – we talked about the fact that the columns were fluted part of the way, and
then down below those flutes were covered over with stucco and the stucco was painted. We
see the same thing here. And if you look very, very closely, you can even see the remains of the
red paint, the red paint that decorated the lower part of these columns. So some interesting
correspondences there in terms of building practice. You can also see here, as we saw in the
House of the Vettii, this wonderful vista from the atrium of the house, through what remains of
the tablinum, into the garden of the house, the peristyle garden of the house, which from the
patron’s point of view was one of the most important, if not the most important part, of the
house.

This is the oecus of the House of the Silver Wedding, and you can see it is extremely well
preserved, and you can also see how very interesting it is, in all kinds of ways. It is a tetrastyle
oecus–again, a banqueting hall–tetrastyle oecus, with four columns. Those columns are stuccoed
and painted over. The paint is very well preserved. It’s a reddish, purplish color, probably meant
to conjure up porphyry, p-o-r-p-h-y-r-y, porphyry, which comes only from Egypt. It’s only quarried
in Egypt, very expensive to bring it that great distance, all the way to Pompeii. And, of course,
this isn’t porphyry, it’s just a painted column. But the whole idea of this, from the patrons’ point
of view, was to look like he and she were very well-heeled, that they could afford to bring–
they’re trying to make the illusion that they could afford to bring this expensive stone, from very
far away, to use in their house here. Look also at the fact that there’s a barrel vault. This is
actually a wooden vault, rather than a concrete vault here in this room. But very nicely done,
and the walls are extensively painted. They are weathered today, but they give you a very good
sense of what would have been the original appearance of this room. And, as I mentioned, we’ll
talk in detail about Roman wall painting, especially because, as you can see, it does depict
architecture. We’ll begin that conversation on Thursday and continue into next week.

Chapter 4. The House of the Faun [00:38:32]

I want to turn now to what is surely the most important surviving house at the city of Pompeii,
and this is the famous House of the Faun. If you’re in Pompeii and you only have time to see two
houses, you go to the House of the Vettii and the House of the Faun. The House of the Faun, as
you can see from your Monument List, dates to the second century B.C., for the most part, and
we see a view, part of Pompeii over here, with a series of houses marked in yellow. And the
reason that I show this to you is because the House of the Faun is particularly large. You can see
from this plan that it takes up in fact the entire block, an entire block of the city of Pompeii, and
it is much larger than some of the others. For example, look at the House of the Vettii over here.
It’s twice, if not larger, than that: twice the size of the House of the Vettii, if not even more than
that. So it’s a very large house. Clearly no expense was spared, either in accumulating the
property, and also in enhancing the décor of the house.

If we look at a plan of the House of the Faun, we will see, without question, that it corresponds
and it follows the Hellenized domus type. We enter over here. We see it has a vestibulum; a
fauces; two cellae, one on either side; an atrium with an impluvium; the cubicula here on either
side; the wings or the alae. It does have a tablinum, you see it over here, and then it has two
peristyle courts, with columns encircling them, a smaller one and then a very large one in the
back. Note also, while this is on the screen, that there is a very interesting room that is located
over here. It’s a rectangular room. It has a couple of columns on bases and pilasters, one on
either side. It opens right off the peristyle court, and on the floor of that space, which we call the
Alexander exedra, e-x-e-d-r-a, after Alexander the Great, because on the floor of that was the
most famous mosaic that we have surviving from antiquity, that represents Alexander the Great,
and I’ll show you that momentarily.

First let me show you what the house looks like from the outside. It’s well preserved. It doesn’t
have its ceiling the way the House of the Vettii does, but otherwise it’s pretty well preserved.
We’re looking down the street on which it finds itself. You see the polygonal masonry blocks. You
see the sidewalks here as well, and how modern they look. You see the stepping stones. And
over here the façade of the House of the Faun. You can see the entranceway, and you can see
that the entranceway has on either side a pilaster, a pilaster with a Corinthian capital above. And
that’s very important, because it’s announcing to us, as did that ideal Hellenized domus that I
showed you before, it’s announcing to us that this is a patron, this is an owner of this particular
house who has leanings toward things Greek and wants us to know that, even before we have
entered into the house.

You go into the house and stand in the vestibule. You will see that there is still quite a bit of
decoration preserved. The walls are painted with blocks, what look like blocks of stone: an
illusion. This is an example of First Style wall painting; we’re going to talk about that on Thursday.
And then up here a shrine is still preserved, a shrine that probably held statues or statuettes of
some of the household gods, the revered gods for this family. This is an excellent view because it
shows us again how entering this house you would stand in the vestibule; you’d go from there
into the fauces, then into the atrium, then into the peristyle that lay beyond – the first smaller
one and then the larger one after that. But it shows us again the point that I’ve made so many
times already, just in this first part of the semester, and that is this Roman interest in vista or
panorama. They’ve set up a view from the moment in which you enter the house, a sequence of
experiences from light to dark to light to dark, but also a sequence of visual experiences that
make entering this house and walking through this house an extraordinary experience, one that
they have helped enhance. And you can also see again the capitals here.

Here’s a view of the atrium as it looks today. We are standing in front of the impluvium. In that
impluvium is a statuette in bronze of the Dancing Faun, from which this house gets its name. The
one that you see there now is a copy and the original is in the Archaeological Museum in Naples.
This view also shows you the way in which you had the series of visual experiences, from the
fauces to the atrium, and ultimately toward the peristyle with its wonderful forest of columns
done à la Grecque, in the Greek style. Here’s another interesting view. We’re still in the atrium.
You can see the Dancing Faun right here. We’re looking at the side wall; if we’re facing the Faun,
this is the wall to the left. This is very helpful because it shows us exactly what the cubicula that
opened off the atrium would’ve looked like. You can see that they were very dark. Some of them
had these tiny slit windows, or perhaps slightly larger slit windows. But for the most part they
were very dark – again meant only as a place to sleep at night and to be used for no other
purpose than that. You can also see from this view that this is a rubble wall that has been
stuccoed over, and that reliefs, painted different colors, have been placed on that wall. This is an
example of so-called First Style Roman wall painting, and we’ll go into what that was, define
what that was, and discuss it in more detail on Thursday.

This is a wonderful restored view of what the House of the Faun would’ve looked like when all of
its First Style Roman wall painting was intact, showing what it would’ve looked like to stand in
the atrium and look back through what survived of the tablinum, with these very large pilasters
again, announcing the Greek leanings of this particular patron. And then the view toward the
peristyle, where you would also see the columns that looked like they were very much in the
Greek style. So here’s clearly a person who not only is building his home to correspond to the
latest in domestic architecture, namely the Hellenized domus type, but who just wants to make
that point over and over and over again: that he’s cultivated, that he knows things Greek, and
that he has the funds to be able to incorporate those into his house. And indeed First Style wall
painting, as we’ll find out when we discuss it, is also a style that is based on Greek prototypes. So
another example of the Greek elements in this building.

What room do you think this is? Oh I didn’t show you this on the plan; I neglected to. But you
can look at your Monument List. When you look at the plan, you’ll see that this house had more
than one atrium; it had two atria. And this is one of them. It’s a tetrastyle atrium, because you
can see there are four columns, one around each corner of the impluvium. So a house with two
peristyles; a house with two atriums, and even one of the atriums has four columns, as you can
see here. And this one is also very useful for the fact–one of you asked me a question, when we
were looking at the Basilica of Pompeii, about why the columns looked the way they did–I think
it was you–and I mentioned that they were pieced, and here you can see that very well, these
drums placed one on top of another. So that you can see over time how easy it would be for
some of those to fall off or become dismantled, and for us to be left with the sort of thing that
we’re left with when we look at what remains in the Basilica of Pompeii. Here’s a view obviously
of one of the peristyles. Here you also see something interesting in terms of building technique.
The columns in Pompeii tend to be either of local stone, a local tufa, or made of these tiles that
look like bricks, but then in either case stuccoed over, white, fluted, to make them look, once
again, like they are marble columns: the illusion that they are marble columns, even though they
are not, to underscore their Greekness.
This is a view of that exedra, that Alexander exedra that I mentioned to you before, that opens
off the first peristyle, with two columns on bases here. Note the red at the bottom, white at the
top. Two pilasters painted red, as you can see. And you can see the tourists standing there,
gazing down. They’re gazing down at a copy. And this copy, by the way, for a very long time, for
as long as I remember going there, except for this last time I was there, there was nothing there,
and I think most people had no realization that this amazing mosaic originally was on the floor.
But they have a put a copy–the mosaic is now in the Naples Archaeological Museum, long ago
moved there. But they finally put a copy down on the floor, so that–of the mosaic that was
there–so that people who visit the House of the Faun realize, oh, this is where the Alexander
Mosaic was located, which is particularly important, because this is a view of the mosaic, this
extraordinary mosaic of Alexander the Great, that’s now in the Naples Archaeological Museum.
And, of course, you can see that they display it there as if it were a panel picture, hanging on the
wall. But that is not how it was displayed, or meant to be displayed, in the House of the Faun. It
was a floor pavement in the House of the Faun. But look how nicely, at least in the museum,
they have recreated the ambience by putting the columns and the pilasters–they tried to
recreate the sense of the exedra, just as it is in the house. It’s just that they put the mosaic in the
wrong place; it should be on the floor.

Nonetheless, you can see it’s an extraordinary work of art. I’m not going to go into it in great
detail, but I did want to expose you to it because it is so important and so magnificent, and I also
want to make absolutely sure that you don’t miss, when you go to the Pompeii area, you do not
miss going to the Archaeological Museum in Naples. It’s an amazing museum, one of the
greatest of all the museums in Italy, and it has of course–almost all the great stuff that comes
from Pompeii is at that museum today. So it’s another one of those asterisked, must-sees. You
look at it here. It represents the battle between Alexander and the Persian King Darius, d-a-r-i-u-
s, at the famous Battle of Issus, i-s-s-u-s, and at that battle Alexander was victorious, and you see
it here. And one of the reasons that it’s so important for our understanding of the House of the
Faun is that we believe that this mosaic was a copy of an earlier lost Greek painting, a Greek
painting of this same scene, of Alexander and Darius, done in around 300 B.C. by a Greek painter,
that was copied for this house in mosaic, sometime in the second century B.C.

So it’s another example of this patron, of this owner of the house, who is so besotted with Greek
art that he wants to have as much of it around him as he possibly can, and he clearly has the
assets that enable him to commission a mosaicist to make this amazing painting [correction:
mosaic]. Now there are a lot of people who talk about this mosaic, and they say, “Well, you
know, it’s such a pale reflection of what the painting would’ve been, and it’s a typical derivative,
Roman art. They had to look at Greek art and derive from it. They couldn’t come up with
anything on their own.” But I would maintain that’s absolutely untrue, and I would also maintain
that to do this kind of work in mosaic, rather than paint, is much more difficult. This is a true tour
de force, to be able to create this kind of active battle scene, with collapsing horses and with
spears in the sky foreshortened, and foreshortened weapons down here. This is an amazing
thing to do in mosaic, when you think of all of these individual tesserae, these small stones,
multicolored stones, that had to be brought together, placed in mortar, to create this amazing
tableau. To me it seems like it is a much, much greater feat to have to achieve that, and to
achieve it so well in mosaic than in paint.

Just quickly a couple of details. Here’s the one of Alexander himself on his horse. It’s an
incredible characterization of the great Hellenistic general and king, and you see him on his
favorite horse, Bucephalus here; and I think it’s a wonderful characterization by this particular,
very talented mosaicist and his workshop, to capture the relationship of man and horse. If you
look at not only the eyes, but also at the hair, the hair of Alexander tousled, flowing in the wind,
the mane of the horse, so closely allied with one another. The artist has really very effectively
captured that again, even just using these very small pieces of stone, which you can see very
well here. Look at the way the shadows are cast, even by that stone. It’s incredible. Here’s the
other detail that I’m going to show you of Darius, in his chariot. As you can see, he’s looking
toward Alexander, he’s mesmerized by the great Hellenistic king, but he’s at the same time
afraid. And he’s beating a retreat, because you can see that his driver has turned the chariot
around. He’s whipping the horse and he’s heading in the other direction, away from Alexander,
as is this figure here. We see his horse from the rear, a real tour de force, depicting a horse. But
he too is looking at Alexander, quite afraid, and his horse is also turning to go off into the
distance. So capturing this very dramatic moment.

And to me the most wonderful detail is this one, that you see down here, which is a view of one
of the fallen Persians; the shield is falling over on him, but the shield is polished to such a shine
that he can see the reflection of his own face. I have a detail to show you of this. He can see the
reflection–you see it here–of his own face in that shield. And this view is particularly good. I took
this one very close up, so that you could see the individual stones. You don’t–from a distance
they blend, but when you go up close you can really see, oh yeah, that’s a mosaic. And it’s really
an extraordinary work of art. A very quick question because–

Student: How big are the stones?

Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: They’re very small, they’re very small, and the reason for that is in
large part so that they will blend ultimately, and from a distance it will have the feel of a
painting. Certainly when it’s on the wall, probably less so when you stood and looked at it, in its
original location, because you’d be looking down on it and you’d be closer to it than here. But it’s
an amazing work. And again remember that although the original painting, done by the Greek
painter, was probably, did hang on a wall, this one was meant as a floor mosaic in this house –
but again a testament to the Greek leanings of this particular patron.

Chapter 5. Additional Pompeian Houses [00:54:00]

Now I also wanted to show you–that’s not the only mosaic in Pompeii. It’s the greatest, by far,
and it’s without question–and I think everyone who studies this stuff would agree with me, that
it’s the finest surviving mosaic in the history of ancient Greek and Roman art. But there are
plenty of other mosaics preserved, including at Pompeii, and I want to show you just one. It’s
mentioned underneath the Alexander mosaic, on your Monument List, because it’s so beloved;
it’s even more beloved by most tourists to the site than the Alexander mosaic, which after all
you can’t see on the site, you have to see it in Naples, at least the original. But this is the so-
called Cave Canem Mosaic, and it belongs to the House of the Tragic Poet, a house that was put
up between 62 and 79 A.D. And you see what’s meant to be a very ferocious dog with his teeth
bared. This one is done much more simply, in only three colors; mainly black and white–tesserae
or small stones; t-e-s-s-e-r-a-e, that’s what these small stones are called, the tesserae–black and
white, basically black on white. But you can see that there’s one touch of red, the collar of the
dog. And the dog is chained, as you can see, just like that poor plaster cast of the dog that we
saw last time, he’s chained. But he’s meant to look very ferocious. He’s baring his teeth. And the
whole point, Cave Canem, beware of dog, is for you to be warned of the fact that if you dare step
any further than that vestibulum, and try to get into this house or try to steal anything or
whatever, this dog will attack. So it’s the same kind of–it’s like a security alarm system actually
for antiquity. And I bet you can tell me where in the house this mosaic was located.

Student: The fauces.

Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner: In the vestibulum or the fauces of the house. Yes, probably the
vestibulum actually, indeed the vestibulum of the house, so that even before you got in as far as
the fauces you were warned that you’d better beware of the dog. And this thing, you will see
this–any of you who’ve been to Pompeii know this and can attest that I’m right–every single
souvenir stand, anywhere within any numbers of yards of Pompeii, is selling the Cave Canem on
everything you can possibly imagine: the mugs, the T-shirts, the hotplates, the whatever, the
tote bags. You can get the Cave Canem in every shape, size and possibility. And I have one of
those myself, only one, only a hotplate, but that’s it. I did it like everybody else at one point,
years ago.

I want to show you briefly a couple of other houses, just to make a few small points, well,
important points, an important point or two about each of them. The first one is the House of
Menander, in Pompeii, which dates to the second century B.C. and later. You see it in plan here.
The House of Menander, like everything else we’ve seen in the latter part of this lecture, is a
Hellenized domus. You can tell that because of the peristyle here. In other respects it’s very
similar to everything we’ve seen: the usual fauces, atrium, cubiculum, tablinum system, the large
peristyle up here, and some dining spaces opening off that peristyle. What makes this particular
house interesting, and the reason that I show it to you, is it’s a good illustration of what happens
when over time you remodel, and also over time, when other property becomes available
nearby. And we can tell from this plan that what happened here is that the core of the house
was added to, as property on either side, additional property, became available, and this owner
purchased that property and added it. And the plan becomes much more irregular obviously,
because of that. An addition over here, an addition over here; some of that sense of axiality and
symmetry is lost when you start to add to either side horizontally. But there are lots of houses
like this, and it’s one of the things one needs to keep in mind as one visits the city and as one
looks at each of these incredible structures.

Just very quickly, with regard to the house, just so you have a sense of what it looks like today.
It’s named the House of Menander because of this painting of the poet who sits on a chair over
there, on one of the walls of the house. Part of the peristyle is actually quite well preserved, as is
the atrium. We’re standing in the atrium, as you can obviously see, with the impluvium, looking
back toward the garden. This is interesting because you can see again the cubicula opening off
either side, but also because of the incorporation, just as in the House of the Faun, of columns
elsewhere than just in the peristyle. These in that transition place between the atrium and the
garden, the so-called tablinum space, these very large columns, stuccoed over, fluted, and you
can see in this case, not painted red at the bottom but a kind of bright yellow to match the colors
of the wall. So again this incorporation of Greek elements into houses like this one. This is also a
good view. It’s a very well-preserved house. We’re back in the atrium again. You can see the way
in which the cubicula, the small cubicula open off that. You can see some of the paintings. And
here’s the entranceway, through the fauces, and you can see in this particular case a small shrine
that’s located in the corner – the purpose of that, for the household to display the household
gods.

This is another interesting house that I just want to treat fleetingly. It’s the so-called House of
Pansa in Pompeii, and it dates to the second century B.C. And it’s a very large house, as you can
see, like all the other Hellenized domuses, because we see that it has a peristyle with columns
here. Like all the others it has everything that we’ve seen: the vestibulum; the fauces; the
atrium; the cubicula; the wings or alae; the tablinum, a dining room; and a bevy of shops down
here. In fact more shops than we have seen be the case in most of the houses we’ve looked at,
at least five, if not six shops down here, which gives us something of a clue to something that
might be going on in this house. If we go back to the peristyle and we take a look at that, we see
that there’s a pool in between the columns. And you might speculate, “Oh how nice; a nice
pleasant pool. You could sit around, you could dip your hands or your feet into that pool; a nice
pleasurable spot to enjoy.” Well actually it wasn’t that at all. We think now that it was probably a
pool that held fish, and fish–not fish, just attractive fish that one could admire, but actually fish
that were sold in one of the shops in front.

One of the reasons we believe that is a scholar by the name of Wilhelmina Jashemski, whose
specialty is gardens of Pompeii, has spent her whole scholarly career–and it was well worth it
because she’s come up with some extraordinary things–on studying the root marks of the
gardens in Pompeii, and she’s been able to demonstrate, through studying those and working
with experts on that sort of thing, just what was grown in these gardens. And you find that some
of them were pleasure gardens with beautiful flowers, and some of them were produce gardens.
And this one was a produce garden, so that there would’ve been vegetables and fruits and so on,
that were gardened here and then they were sold in the shops that were located at the front. So
here we see a wonderful example of the way in which these houses could even be used by some
owners as a means of income for them and for their families, and that was surely the case with
the House of Pansa. It also has a very well-preserved peristyle. We can see the columns here
around that pool that was used to hold the fish that were sold in one of the shops. The columns
are extremely well preserved, including some of the capitals, Ionic capitals, as you can see here,
and the fluting, and then the plain, stuccoed over at the bottom, with the paint–you can see in
this case, remains of the red paint that would’ve decorated the bottom part of those columns.

Another very interesting house, and one that’s important for us because it marks a later
development in Roman house architecture in Pompeii, is the House of Marcus Loreius
Tiburtinus. Remember Tibur was the ancient word for Tivoli, and so it’s likely that Tiburtinus in
fact came from Tivoli, moved to Pompeii, and built this large house sometime between the
earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius, so 62 to 79 A.D. Like the House of the Faun, it took up
an entire city block. But you can see that the owner has made a different decision than the
owner of the House of the Faun, because the house itself takes up very little space, and most of
the space is taken up by the garden. We’re less sure here whether this was a pleasurable
garden–there are some indications that it might have been–or whether it too was used as a
produce garden. We don’t have all those shops on the front, so that seems less likely here. But
you can see it’s another example of the way in which these houses are becoming not only more
personalized, but also with much more emphasis on the garden and on the dining rooms that
are surrounding that garden; we see one of those dining rooms here.

What’s particularly interesting about this house, and one that helps us round the circle to where
I began at the beginning of the lecture when I talked about the fact that it was between 62 and
79 that the Pompeians began to build second stories on their houses. They began to expand
vertically, and we saw the cenaculae of the Via dell’Abbondanza building. We see the same thing
happening here, that a second story has been added around the living quarters. Now here it was
obviously really needed, because they weren’t giving much space to the living quarters, so they
had to build up vertically for those. And if you look very carefully at the restored view, you will
see that the windows of that second story open off and look out over onto the compluvium of
the atrium. You see that there, the compluvium of the atrium, and then around it you can see
the second story, with the windows looking out over the compluvium of the house. Then the
rest, needless to say, garden.

It’s actually pretty well preserved. It’s fun to wander around. You see these wonderful trellises
and all kinds of interesting architectural forms that are part of this incredible garden, in the
House of Tiburtinus. And you even see there this magnificent grotto, which leads me to believe
that we’re beginning to see something interesting here, which is the incorporation of the sorts of
things that you would tend to see in villas, not right in the center of a city, but villas that were
located either outside the city or along the coast. And the reason I say that here is because we
can see this grotto-like effect, where we have what looks like a pebbled effect on the back wall:
painted, two columns, Corinthian columns, with a pediment above, and then these two
wonderful mythological paintings. This one you probably recognize as the Myth of Narcissus. You
can see his reflection in the water; he’s admiring himself in his reflection down below, and then
Pyramus and Thisbe over here. What’s important to us is not which myths, but just that Greek
myths are incorporated into the scheme here; so this pretension toward things Greek. But most
important this grotto-like element that you would tend to find in a villa along the Amalfi Coast or
some such, rather than in downtown Pompeii. So we’re beginning to see this interesting
merging, at least for the very well-to-do, the rich and famous as we–the lifestyles of the rich and
famous, as this lecture is called; we begin to see that in some of the houses, especially in the
later period.

Chapter 6. Villa of the Mysteries [01:05:59]

The second to last building that I want to show you is an extremely important one; the last one
we’ll just look at for a minute or so. But this one is an extremely important building. It is the Villa
of the Mysteries, in Pompeii. It is indeed a villa. So it’s a nice segue from the Loreius Tiburtinus
House. What started to happen in Pompeii, even though there was quite a bit of space initially,
as time went on things became more crowded, and the really well-to-do began to move outside
the city, to the suburbs, so to speak, right outside the city – interestingly enough, right along
those same streets that formed the cemeteries, of the city. So we see the villas and the
cemeteries intermixing in a very natural way. But this very important villa was part of that
development. And I want to say–it went through a couple of phases, and I want to show you the
two phases here.

Only Phase Two is on your Monument List, so I won’t hold you responsible for Phase One, but I
think it’s important for us to look at it together. Because what we see here is something very
interesting. Looking at the top, we see the entrance into the villa. We see the peristyle there, the
atrium there, and the tablinum there. Now what do you think about that? It’s very strange.
We’ve never seen a house or villa that departed from the scheme that we talked about before,
from this movement from the entranceway, the fauces, into the peristyle first, then into the
atrium, then into the tablinum. It’s a different progression. We might think to ourselves, well this
must be the whim of this particular patron, but Vitruvius tells us otherwise. Vitruvius tells us
about villa design, and he tells us the major distinction between Roman villas and Roman
houses, in terms of their plan, is that in Roman villas you enter into the peristyle first. So it shows
again the growing interest in peristyles. And yet this peristyle, very, very early indeed, because it
belongs to the first phase, which is even before the early second century B.C., which is when the
second phase is dated. We can also see here a great podium, and I’ll say a bit more about the
podium as we look at Phase Two.

This is Phase Two of the house, and this is the one that you have–the villa–this is the one that
you have on your Monument List. The main spaces are labeled here. You can see the
entranceway; the fauces; the peristyle first, a very large peristyle; the atrium of the house here;
the tablinum over here. So this different order described by Vitruvius. We can see also that it
rests on a tall podium. I’ll show you what it looks like in a moment. It is a podium that looks
exactly like the podia we saw for the great sanctuaries at Tivoli and Palestrina. We see that
underneath that podium, just as at those – or Jupiter Anxur at Terracina, just as at Terracina – we
see there’s a cryptoporticus or underground passageway, underneath that podium. It is barrel
vaulted, and the concrete is faced with opus incertum work, just as we saw it in the sanctuaries.
Why have this kind of podium here? To give the villa an even grander appearance, to put it up
high on top of a podium, and also to help to muffle the sounds from the street–remember, this is
a major street, a thoroughfare that’s just left the city and has become an intercity road–to muffle
the sounds that one would hear from that, by raising the villa in a sense away from them.

The most important point though that I can make about this villa, and something that speaks to
the future, is the fact that we are beginning to see–we’ve talked about how enclosed and plain
and severe the earlier exteriors of Roman houses were, even up through the Hellenized domus,
except perhaps for the addition of a pilaster or a column here and there. Here we see something
entirely new happening. We see that the architect has designed these elements that project out
of the rectangle of the villa plan, and are curved; and you can see one over here, and most
importantly one over here. It’s like a giant bay window, with views that can be seen through that
bay window. So this projecting out into the viewer’s space and so on, and also into the space of
those who live inside this building, offer wonderful panoramas and vistas of the sea beyond. The
sea was closer to Pompeii at that point than it actually is today: beautiful views out onto the sea,
and in a sense the exterior of the structure breaking out of its rectangular bonds to do
something entirely different from what has come before.

This is a restored view of what that structure would’ve looked like in its second phase, and I think
you can see that very well here, resting on this tall podium. Arcades, just as at the sanctuaries;
these are blind arcades, just as we saw there. Concrete opus incertum facing. But look at the
difference that having this bay window has made. They’ve opened up the wall. The windows are
very large. No more slit windows. Big panoramic windows, projecting elements, also with very
large windows, there’s hardly any wall there whatsoever. The rest is the same. The compluvium,
the peristyle, all look like they did in the Hellenized domus. But this is a big change and one that
looks forward again to the future.

This is a view of it as it looks today: the Villa of the Mysteries. You can see the great podium over
here, with its blind arcades, as well as part of the house. And look at how open that house is.
Now part of this is villas. There’s more of a desire when you build a villa to open it up, more so
than a house in town. But it’s also an important development for architecture as a whole. This is
a view of the peristyle court. It’s a little different than any other peristyle court we’ve seen,
because you can see they have embedded the columns into the wall of the–there’s a wall
around; the columns are embedded into that, which is a different motif. And I thought you’d be
amused to see that the Villa of the Mysteries is one of those – and there are several places in
Italy, many places in Italy, where people go in particular to take photos, after their wedding, to
take photos of themselves: photo-op places. And the Villa of the Mysteries is one of them. So
don’t be at all surprised, if you are there, especially on a weekend, if you see a wedding party
taking photos. And this was one of the more discreet photos. You can just imagine the kinds of
poses that people take in places like this. I could’ve shown you all kinds of very amusing, very
loving photos of the bride and groom. But here you just get a sense of the photographer, and
there were several photographers the day I took this, getting wonderful images of this bride and
groom after the happy event.

I just want to close, just very briefly, with this last house, or this mosaic fountain from this last
house. It’s the so-called House of the Large Fountain, so-called because of this extraordinary
fountain that was found there and still exists. Dates to between the earthquake the eruption of
Vesuvius, 62 to 79 A.D. It’s very well preserved. You see it here on the right-hand side of the
screen. It shows you that mosaics could be applied to any kind of surface by these very talented
artists, in this case applied to a curved surface, as you can see very well here, once again using
multi-colored tesserae, as we saw in the Alexander mosaic. And you can only imagine how lovely
it was when there was actually a water display and so on, in fact, so lovely that it was imitated
almost exactly for the Getty Villa in Malibu, which I show you on the left-hand side of the screen.
Many of you have probably been there.

The Getty Villa–it looks like Disneyland I know, but it probably gives you a better sense of what a
Roman villa looked like in antiquity than anything else, even that you can see in Rome, because
it’s in such pristine shape. And it really gives you–it is based, for any of you who don’t know, it is
actually based on a villa from Herculaneum that was excavated. We know it. It’s based very
closely on it, the so-called Villa of the Papyri, at Herculaneum, and then it picks and chooses–it
looks at other things as well and incorporates them, as it incorporated this fountain. But it
probably gives you–it’s in better condition. You can see that the water display is actually working,
unlike the one in Pompeii. So it gives you a very good sense of what this thing would have looked
like in antiquity. And just as a look forward, one of the paper topics for this course actually is to
talk about the Villa of the Papyri, in the context, in part, and being helped by the reconstruction
at the Getty Museum.

On Thursday we will move on to Herculaneum. We will talk about the lives of the people there,
some of the houses that were built there between the earthquake and Vesuvius, and we will also
begin our conversation about First Style and Second Style Roman wall painting. We’ll have a few
lectures on painting, because it’s so important as the interior decoration of these homes, and
because, as we’ll see, it depicts architecture–and you can get a sense of that here–in ways that
are very intriguing and that tell us even more about buildings than we already know. Thanks
everybody. Have a good morning.

[end of transcript]

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