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8.2 A Mystical Marriage
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From the course by Yale University
Roman Architecture
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Exploring Special Subjects on Pompeian Walls
Painted renditions of special subjects inserted into Second through Fourth Style Roman wall paintings. These include mythological, landscape, genre, still life, and history painting, as well as painted portraiture. Highlights include the Dionysiac Mysteries paintings and the Riot in the Amphitheater, both from residences in Pompeii.
Meet the Instructors
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
So those monumental figures tell a story, and it's a very interesting,
very intriguing, very mysterious story indeed.
And it is from the mystery scenes here by the way that the villa of the mysteries
got its name.
This is a view over here, an excellent view of the small
doorway that you need to take to enter into the room.
And as you enter into the room and you make a sharp left, well first of course,
you enter in the room and you get a glimpse of the entire space.
But as you turn to your immediate left, you begin with the beginning of the story.
And the artist again has orchestrated this in such a way as to make it look like this
woman who is standing here has actually entered through the doorway of the room,
and is now beginning to process from that doorway along the side of the room.
If we look at the woman, we see that she is wearing a quite
heavy garment over here, but it's a very jaunty representation of this woman,
because you can see she has her right hand on her hip in an interesting way.
And then most interesting of all is the fact that she wears a veil
over her head and it's a kind of diaphanous veil as I think you can see.
It's over her head, protects her hair, and then it wraps around her,
she wraps in around her chest, she's holding one
corner of it with her left hand and the rest cascades down her back.
The artist has paid a great deal of attention to that veil because he wants to
identify her for us, and to tell us that she is a bride.
Brides were often depicted with voluminous veils like that,
as you see you see her here.
And she is a bride as we're going to find out as we interpret these scenes.
She is a bride, probably a young Pompeiian woman who is about to
participate in these religious rites that are going to allow her to,
kind of like a fraternity or sorority initiation that she's about to undergo.
It's a sorority initiation that she's about to undergo,
because she's about to go through something that's going to enable her
ultimately to enter into a mystical marriage with the god of wine, Dionysus.
She enters here.
Then she comes upon two other figures.
There's a seated woman, as you can see, who holds in her left hand, a scroll.
She has her right hand on the shoulder of a little boy.
Note that the little boy is completely naked and
completely oblivious to the fact that he is naked.
He holds in his hand another scroll which he has unfurled.
And it looks as if,
well it's no question he is very intent on looking at the text on that scroll.
And it looks as if he is reading from the text of that scroll.
And we interpret that scroll, or we interpret his participation in this scene
as probably the fact that he is reading the liturgy.
The liturgy that has to do with this cult of Dionysus and
with the mystical marriage of women with the god Dionysus.
It's a wonderful depiction of that boy, and
I also show you here, the rest of that particular side of the room.
We're going to look at all the figures in order, but
I just wanted you to get a sense of the rest of the wall as it unfurls.
This left wall as you first come into the room.
And I wanted to point out using this image that, again,
about how sophisticated this particular artist was because he takes
into consideration, as I mentioned before, the corners of the room.
And they become part of the narrative.
As you can see here, there's an empty space, but the storyline,
as we'll see, continues across the corner.
And the figures over here interact with the figures on the other side of
the bend in the wall in, again, a very, very sophisticated and interesting way.
And we'll follow that through.
Before we do, though, I just want to show you a head detail of the seated woman to
give you a sense of the extraordinary talent of this artist,
who's name unfortunately, has not come down to us.
We see this head here and
you can see the way in which the artist has captured the moment.
What this woman is going through, what she's thinking about, she's seated,
she's listening to the liturgy that's being spoken by this boy.
You can see that the artist has paid a great deal of attention to her
eyes which are wide open and very nicely painted.
But one gets the sense, or at least I get the sense as I look at this that she is
not only wide eyed at what's going but you also have a sense that she's kind of,
it's almost jaded, she's kind of seen it all.
She has a sense of what the moment is and what is about to occur.
Notice also the way in which her lips are slightly parted and especially the hair.
The artist as we'll see who is responsible for painting this and
it may have been more than one artist.
It may have been a designer who worked with obviously others in a workshop.
But whether it's a single individual or several, it is very clear that this person
or persons have a very good sense of what hair, real hair is actually like.
It's the same as I mentioned when we talked about the villa, the Gardenscape
of Livia and I said that that artist had clearly looked at nature and
was actually depicting what he saw and knew about nature.
Here is somebody I believe who has really looked at human beings,
who has really looked at the way in which hair grows from the scalp.
Because you can see the way in which he has shown that hair
growing from the scalp and he understands that when you part your hair in middle,
there may be a certain part of the scalp that you actually see through the hair.
And he's represented that extremely realistically here.
So although we don't know the name of this particular artist we can we can acclaim
his talent here as we look at details such as this one.
The stories continuous from the boy reading
the liturgy to the figure that you see here.
It is a figure again of a woman, she is holding some kind of a dish.
And she has on that dish probably it's very hard to identify
exactly what's there.
But she has probably some items that have something to do with this cult,
with this mystical marriage of these Pompeian women with Dionysus.
She is dressed and she has a light colored top and a purple, there's a lot
of purple in this scene, a very vividly purple skirt as you can see down here.
She is the first woman of the group to wear a laurel wreath over her head,
as you can see.
And she and all of them, by the way, wear bracelets.
You can bracelets around her lower arms.
Some of them wear these arm bracelets up higher on their arms as we'll also see.
And she's one of the only figures that actually looks out at us, the spectator.
She really is basically confronting us.
We link eyes with her when we look at this particular painting,
and the artist is obviously trying to establish fairly early on,
a connection between the viewer and what is happening in this scene.
The beginning of another scene here with a series of women.
I have a better view of it here, where you can see what's happening next.
Here we have three women who are standing at some kind of a table.
And one of the women,
the woman on the right has a pitcher from which she's pouring some kind of liquid.
Whether it's water or wine or what, we're not absolutely sure.
It might well be wine, given that this is a mystery of Dionysius.
She may be pouring wine.
But whatever it is, it has been interpreted as a purification scene.
In which something, and we can't see what it is, that's underneath
this purple piece of cloth that one of the women is holding up and revealing.
They are purifying that, either an object or a series of objects on this table.
It's a wonderful depiction of these three women,
one woman holding the edge of the table over here and
looking to her compatriot who is pouring the liquid on this side.
And a real tour de force.
It's not so easy to depict a figure from the rear and make it work, but
this artist has done so.
A very monumental woman seated on a wonderful throne here,
with the purple hem as you can see down below.
But look at the way he's depicted her garment, it's tight in some places and
molds her body, and cascades in others.
She's also wearing a scarf that's tied back behind her head and
she too wears a laurel wreath over that scarf.
This woman has a laurel wreath as well.
So, they're purifying as part of this rite, they are purifying.
Three women are participating and purifying this object or objects here.
This woman has her, she's not really looking,
well she isn't looking at what she's doing.
As you can see, she doesn't seem to be watching the purification but
rather is looking at this fellow over here and given what he looks like I guess
that's not surprising, her glance is caught by him.
Now who is he?
He is what we call a Silenus, S-I-L-E-N-U-S, and
a Silenus is an older satyr, S-A-T-Y-R.
Who were the satyrs?
The satyrs were the compatriots of Pan,
P-A-N, compatriots of Pan.
And so a young Satyr grows up into an old Silenus, and you see that Silenus here,
and he's a very interesting figure.
You can see that he's completely naked and
in fact, they're naked men and naked women in this, as we'll see.
But it's interesting to see which ones are and which ones aren't.
He is, and you can see that this great purple mantle that he had
draped around his body has completely or almost completely fallen off.
He is playing a lyre as you can see here and
probably singing along with his lyre play.
And not only has his garment fallen off, but
you can see that he is not, one foot is on the pedestal on which,
well on a base on which the pedestal that supports the lyre is located.
But another leg has slipped off that pedestal.
Why is that?
He's quite tipsy.
We know that the Silenus, the Silenuses and the satyrs did a lot of drinking.
Very serious drinking.
He's clearly imbibed and he is not very much in control of himself any longer so
he's probably pretty oblivious to the fact that his clothing has fallen off and
that he too has slipped off the base as he sings.
So it's not surprising that this woman casts
her glance to the goings on next to her.
Here are the, I mentioned the satyrs, and
we see two of the young satyrs right next to that older man.
The satyrs again are associated with Pan.
And goats are also associated with Pan and
you can see one of them is feeding the goats here.
These young boys and is true of the man too,
I neglected to mentioned it, all have sort of Pan or animal ears.
As you can see very clearly here, the pointed animal ears.
And this one is playing a flute.
So one playing a flute, one feeding the goats,
both of them seated on a kind of rocky area over here.
This figure is of particular interest,
it's a woman clothed with a white garment that is sleeveless,
she has one of these bracelets on the upper part of her arm.
It is clear that she is afraid and she is fleeing from something.
You can see that she holds up her
left hand as if she is trying to ward something horrific off.
And you can see that she is, but she can't, by the way.
While she's holding up her hand to ward it off, you can see that she's absolutely
mesmerized by whatever it is that she's seeing.
Her eyes are staring straight ahead, wide eyed, staring straight ahead to
look at whatever it is that is at one hand fascinating, and on the other horrific.
She is clearly in a rush because you can see that the purple mantle that she wore
has been caught in the breeze as she tries to escape.
The breeze is caught in that and
it almost serves the purpose of a kind of parachute that's about to rescue her
from whatever it is that she has seen and that has frightened her.
We are now at the first corner of the room.
So again, the artist has taken the corner into consideration and
created this dramatic interaction between this woman and
whatever it is that she's afraid of on the other side of the corner.
And before I show that to you, I just wanted to show you a close up of her face
to again give you a sense of how talented,
how extraordinarily gifted this artist was in capturing the moment,
in capturing the feelings that this woman must have been going through.
Once again, the very wide eyes, fascinated by what she sees,
but seemingly all knowing.
She's seeing something that she doesn't quite expect, but
you get the sense that perhaps she did know all along.
That she was going to see something of this nature.
The parted lips once again, and the expert way in which the artist has shown
the way hair naturally grows out of the scalp of the head,
again achieved magnificently in this head detail.
Now the object of her fear is what we now see over here.
Here again we see the coroner, the corner itself an empty red space,
the woman fleeing on this side.
What is she fleeing from?
What is she afraid of?
This horrific mask that is being held by one of the satyrs.
We see another set of two young satyrs here and an old Silenus again.
And one of the satyrs holding up this horrible mask.
And that seems to be what has put fear into the eyes of this particular woman.
With regard to the scene of the satyrs, you can see that the Silenus and
the Satyrs, the Silenus is seated on some kind of marble block.
As you can see here, he looks very similar to the one that we saw before.
An older man with those animal ears, as you can see.
And one of the satyrs holds the mask.
But all of these figures, by the way, are semi-naked.
You can see that they have bare chests in all cases, and
the mantle's only covering the lower parts of their bodies and
the Silenus, while looking back toward the woman,
is holding a large cup from which one of the satyrs is drinking.
It's a kind of, I always think of this as a kind of Maury's cup and
you see that the the Silenus is holding it.
The younger satyr is drinking from it.
So again, this is a lot to do with drinking and getting drunk, this mystery.
And at least from the male point of view because it actually seems to be the men
who are drinking and not the women who are drinking in this particular instance.
Let me also show you a detail of this young satyr drinking out of the cup.
And you can see how gifted again, this particular artist is.
I don't think this artist always gets the hands right.
He tries.
They're sometimes a little bit awkward, but
on the other hand he really has made an effort to show the way in which hands and
fingers grip something, both from the bottom and also from the top.
He's very good with the eyes.
Again, it's just wonderful the way he has achieved showing this satyr on one hand,
greedily drinking from the cup, but at the same time with one eye,
you can see one eye and that one eye is very much on what it is that he's doing.
He's looking at that liquid quite intently as he drinks it, and
I think that's very well-achieved here.
And again, this extraordinary way in which the artist has depicted
the hair of this young man as it grows out of his scalp.
Particularly talented.
You don't see that very often in Roman painting.
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