Roman Architecture is a course for people who love to travel and want to discover the power of architecture to shape politics, society, and culture.
5.6 Villa of the Mysteries
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From the course by Yale University
Roman Architecture
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From the lesson
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Houses and Villas at Pompeii
Domestic architecture at Pompeii from its beginnings to the eruption of Vesuvius with emphasis on the development of the domus italica and the Hellenized domus and featuring the House of the Faun and Villa of the Mysteries.
Meet the Instructors
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
I'd like to, the last, one of 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, 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 this
city to the, to the suburbs, so to speak, right outside the city.
Interestingly enough, right along those same streets
that form the cemeteries of the city.
So we see this, 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, it went through a couple
of phases, and I want to show you the two phases here.
The phase, only phase two is on your monument list, I will 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.
We're 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? I mean it's very strange.
We've never seen a house that, a house or villa
that departed from the scheme that we talked about before from
this movement, from the entrance way, the fauces into
the peristyle first, then into the atrium, then into the tablinum.
It's a different progression.
We, we might, 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, or, or, you know, even before the
early second century A.D., which is when, 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, 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 will show 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, 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,
to muffle the sounds from the street. Remember, there's a major street.
A, a, thoroughfare, that leads, that's just left the
city, and is, 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 domes,
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
the, 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, with, with you
know, views, that can be seen through that bay window.
So this projecting out into the viewer space and so on and, and also into the
space of those who live inside this building,
offering 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 the, the,
in a sense, the exterior of the structure breaking
out of its 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 have 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 of this, 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, you know, 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.
As you can see they have embedded the columns into
the wall, of the, the, the wall of the, the.
There's a wall around it, the columns are
embedded in to that, which is a different motif.
And I thought you'd be amused to see that, 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 of, after their wedding, to take photos of themselves, photo-op places.
And the Villa of the Mys- of the mysteries is one of them.
So you, 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 discrete photos.
You can just imagine the kinds of poses that people take in, in [LAUGH]
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, and 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 the, with
this last house or this mosaic fountain from this last house.
It's a 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 and the eruption of
the 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.
This, in this case it 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, it is based, for any of who don't know,
it is actually based ex, on a, on a, 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, you know, 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, is
to talk about the Villa of the Papyri in
the context in part and being helped by, the rec,
reconstruction at the Getty Museum.
On Thursday we will move on to Herculanium.
We will talk about the lives of the people there, some of the houses
that were built there between the eruption
of, of 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 decorations 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.
Good afternoon. Good morning.
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