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8.5 The Wanderings of Odysseus
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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
I want to show you in the half an hour that
remains a a number of other paintings much, in much
less detail but paintings that also are of special subjects
that also belong to second, third, or fourth style walls.
And they're particularly interesting in a variety of ways.
The first of these is also mythological in subject matter.
I'm going to show you the so-called Odyssey paintings.
We're moving back to Rome.
These are located in a house on the Esquiline
hill, one of the Rome's original seven hills, in Rome.
And while I don't, I think I neglected to give you a date for the mystery paintings,
but those are 60 to 50, and these paintings
are a little bit later, 50 to 40 BC.
They are also extremely interesting because they seem to represent
scenes from the tenth and 11th book of Homer's Odyssey.
And Vitruvius the architectural theorist, writing in
the age of Augustus, Vitruvius tells us
that the Greeks were particularly interested in
representing the wanderings of Odysseus in landscapes.
So he tells us, that's very important for us to know
because it means that the Greeks painted paintings like this illustrations
of Odysseus's wanderings. And yet, we see one of these paintings in
this house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, between 50 and 40
B.C. The books 10 and 11 focus
on Odysseus's coming upon the Laestrygonians.
I put that name on the monument list for you, the Laestrygonians.
And what happens when he meets the Laestrygonians?
And we see one of the scenes here.
We see, in fact, that several scouts working for Odysseus get
off their boats on an island, and they come across this beautiful
young woman, who is, turn, who is has just fetched, you can
see she's holding a pitcher, she's just fetched water from a well.
And she's walking
down this mountain and, and she comes upon these scouts of Odysseus.
And being a friendly sort, she says to them, I'd
like to invite you back to my father's house for dinner.
Well her father is a man-eating giant, as are the other Laestrygonians.
And the scouts fall for it, and they come with her to meet her father.
And the father immediately cooks up one of the three for dinner.
And, other various other adventurers happen, on this island.
But what's particularly interesting for us is the
fact that these, these scenes again are from a
well known work of literature but the figures
are, are very small in relation to the landscape.
It's clear that the artist, whether the, you know,
originally Greek artists were particularly interested in the landscape and
the telling of a narrative across that landscape a landscape
that is magnificently rendered as you can see by these artists.
There are a number of scenes still preserved.
After that dinner, by the way, where one
of the scouts gets gets consumed after that,
the Laestrygonians decide that they don't want anymore
of Odysseus and his, and his, and his crew.
And they
take boulders, as you can see in this
scene here, and they begin to attack the ships
of Odysseus, destroying most of them and only
the one with Odysseus himself is able to escape.
And he makes his way at that point, to the to
the, to another island to meet up with the enchant-,, enchantress, Circe.
So we see all of these very carefully described here.
But as we look at these scenes, I think
we're particularly struck, or at least
I'm particularly struck, and I would imagine
you'll share this, by the interest of this artist in depicting the landscape.
We have an artist again, whether it's the original Greek
artist but certainly copied here by an artist in Rome.
We see an incredible interest in landscape by someone who was clearly not only
looking at earlier models, but looking at
landscape itself and is very interested in depicting
all kinds of anecdotal details.
Inlets of water, as you can see here, rocks and the way in which
the rock is casting shadow on one side and is lighted on the other.
The way in which branches bend both when people pull
on them or when they are, they are buffeted by
the breeze or by the wind as you can see
with that tree at the uppermost part of the peak.
So,
again, the artist here, particularly interested in nature
and in the display of nature and in
that way very comparable to what we saw
in Libya's gardenscape at the villa at Prima Porta.
I mentioned already that, that it is
believed that these paintings on the Esquiline
Hill are based on Hellenistic Greek models that probably were made in about 150 BC.
So a copy, and in that regard, should strike
you as very much the same trend as we've
seen so often in the beginning of this semester
of the Romans looking back and admiring Greek art and
incorporating it, a kind of Hellenization of Roman
art and architecture, because of this reverence and
because of this incorporation of earlier Greek scenes
and prototypes and so we see that here.
And one, and there are three reasons that scholars believe that what
we're looking at here is based very closely on a Greek model.
One of those is that passage in Vitruvius that I already mentioned,
that Vitruvius tells us that the Greeks were particularly interested
in representing scenes from the Odyssey against the landscape background.
So that certainly tells us that it's likely that these
are, are based on, on a, an earlier Greek originals.
The second has to do, you've probably noticed this, with the
fact that many of the figures in this paintings are labelled.
And those labels are
if you look very closely you will see, in Greek.
And not only are they in Greek, but some of the words are misspelled.
So, since those words are misspelled, it has been speculated and
I think again quite convincingly that those who are misspelling them don't
really know Greek uh,and maybe, Roman artists who are not familiar
with that language, are copying it and making mistakes in the process.
So that also
suggest to us that earlier Greek models are
being looked at, absorbed and even copied here.
But most interest of all for us aficionados of the second style is the
fact that very careful the archaeologists who have looked at
these with great care have determined that the landscape scenes that we've studied,
are continuous beneath the columns.
That when they copied these, they copied, perhaps
they had a scroll, that they had from
somewhere else, a Greek scroll that came from
a library that had, you know, images on it.
And they unfurled that scroll and they copied it here.
They did that first, they copied, so we had a continuous landscape scene.
And it was only after that landscape scene was painted that the artist went
back and painted the columns on top.
They put these Greek paintings of, or copies of these Greek paintings of
Odysseus' wanderings based on this Greek prototype of the mid-second century B.C..
They put it into a Roman context by providing these
second style wall second style columns or pilasters,
pilasters, I believe pilasters by creating second style
pilasters, and making this into a vista or
panorama that would of been seen through the
window in the sense of a second style painting.
So it's a Romanization of a, of an original Greek Painting in, in an
extraordinary way, that tells us a good
deal about how the Romans were thinking about
these Greek prototypes at this particular juncture.
I showed you last time the Villa of Oplontis, the Caldarium Eight.
And we looked at the soffit of Caldarium Eight and we saw, eyes
floating, mythological figures and we saw women in niches with shells at the top.
And I pointed out to you at that time, that we also have a number of
small panel pictures representing still lives with fruit and the like.
And these get, in a sense get lost in a
overall scheme of these 2nd, 3rd and 4th style walls.
But they are very interesting if we look at them in su-,
in greater detail and I want to show you just two examples today.
This is a, a, it's blown up obviously way beyond the size that it was
but it gives you some sense of what these look like in detail.
It's a still life painting that comes from the villa
of Julia Felix in Pompeii, which dates to around 50 BC.
And we, and it probably, we do believe that
it, it is a detail from a 2nd style wall.
And we look at that detail here and we see
that these for those of those who enjoy modern art,
for example, I think you'll agree that this is as, tends to be as modern as Roman
art gets, because we see, it has a very
contemporary appearance I think, this particular still life painting.
We see that the artist has shown a striking uh,penchant for, or
sensitivity for composition, for light, the way in which light falls
on objects of, that are made of different materials, be it metal or stone.
The artist has shown that kind of sensitivity I think here, as well as to
composition, the way in which a group of
objects are composed in relationship to one another.
If we look at this painting, I think we'll agree that it's quite tour de force.
We see some interesting things which are not that easy to decipher.
We see over here for example
a cloth, with fringe that hangs on a nail on the wall.
We see over here, also hanging on the wall, four dead birds.
We see a plate of, a oval plate of what seem to be eggs.
We see a pitcher over here, which again, it looks like
a metal pitcher bathed in light on one side with a handle.
And then we see here what looks like
some kind of a beaker with a something that
may have been used to stir whatever liquid was inside.
All of this on a stone pedestal; and then leaning against that stone pedestal we see
a one of these clay clay vessels which
seems to have an inscription on that clay vessel.
So, what is this still life painting? Is it just meant to be a mix
of objects that would be found in the kitchen
of the house or is it something more than that?
Do these have meanings beyond that?
Is there some religious symbolism here for example?
This is not easy to decipher, and no one really
has done that satisfactorily up to this point, but it's
something that one would want to keep in mind as
one thinks about the meaning of these still life paintings.
And keep in mind again, if you think back to a room like
the ixion room, there are a number of
these small panel paintings in the ixion room.
When you look at the room as a whole, these are not easy to see.
They are, they are so small that they are lost in the overall scheme.
So you really have to go up very close to these if you could even reach them.
If they are way up in the top, it would be difficult.
But if they are down below, go up close, look at them
and try to figure out for yourself, exactly what is going on here.
Another one from
in this case from Herculaneum, which is not so ingeniously called a still life
painting with peaches and glass jar, but
that's very descriptive, that' s exactly what it
depicts which is later in date around 62 to 79 And probably was a panel in either a
third or a 4th style Roman painting or Roman painted wall.
We see two tiers here.
We indeed do
see peaches, and the artist, again, has really looked at peaches to depict this.
Shows the peaches on the vine with the leaves, as you can see here.
And wants to make sure that we know what a peach looks like
inside as well, so has cut a section off one of these and shows
the pit inside just to make sure that we get a full sense of,
of how peaches grow, and what happens when you, when you open a peach.
And then down here below, a glass vase and you can
see that the artist has filled that vase halfway with water,
so that he can explore the effects of light on that
water, and the reflection of that water on the glass vase itself.
So clearly again artists that that, there, there may be other reasons that
they juxtaposed these particular items, these reasons
that may be beyond our comprehension today.
But while they may do that for ritual or other reasons,
they also are clearly very concerned, with just exploring composition, light
and so on and so forth, as I said before, which
is a very, which is a very modern thing to do.
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