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5.1 Introduction and the Ideal Domus Italica
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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.
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Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
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 1st centuries B.C. and the 1st 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 far, at the left a
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, is relatively
well preserved and what is significant about it, 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 AD.
And we see that, that it has two stories
in this instance, a story down below that may
have been that has entrance ways, 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, cenaculae. 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 are 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, are have two stories and that
the second, that adding a second story to a Roman building is, 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 widow.
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 Pompeiian domestic architecture.
And so what I'm going to do is take us back to the beginning and
trace Rome, Pompeiian 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 4th and 3rd 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 8th century B.C..
And these Italic tribes built houses, obviously, in which they lived already
in the 4th and 3rd, substantial houses, in which they lived already in
the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C..
I want to begin our conversation about domestic architecture in Pompeii and,
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 con-, 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 the, or the, 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
me-, 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 house,
houses so well after we go through them today.
Here you see the plan of the typical Domis Italica.
You can see that number one is the entrance into the house.
The entrance
to the house was called the fauces, fauces,
the fauces or the throat of the house.
Sometimes the fauces was 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, get in from the rain
in case it was raining outside while you waited for the door to be opened.
But in these early, these very early Domus Italica houses we don't tend to see the
vestibulum so, think that 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 cells, or cellae,
cella in the singular, and cellae, cellae 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 and, and live, 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,
tabernae, shops or tabernae.
And those shops could either used by those who own the house to make additional money
or they could be leased out to others, 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, atrium.
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 monument list.
The impluvium of the house, which is a
pool in which they collected rainwater for daily use.
How did they collect
that rain water?
Because there was a, an opening in the ceiling, also rectangular in shape.
That's called a compluvium.
And that, and the compluvium had, 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 four 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 five, we see the wings, or the alae, alae,
the wings or the alae, alae in the singular, ala 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 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 six on axis and we know how much
the Romans like axiality as well as symmetry, we see
the the room over here a six is on axis with the fauces and the atrium.
This room is called the tablinum, tablinum.
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, 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 seven,
we see the 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 the from atrium.
And then at the back, number eight for open
of these ideal Roman houses, the hortus, hortus, or the
garden of the house, which was obviously open to the sky.
If you look at the restored view you can see how in the,
how these ver-, 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.
And we'll see a very important and interesting evolution.
As I've, another point
that I want to make from the start is, is just as in temple
architecture, and we've traced it, the development
of early Roman temple architecture, where we saw
the, 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 Pompeiian 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, this progression of one
space on, an, an axial progression of one
space to another space' til, 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, 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 6th century BC.
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 provide stone pillows here.
Not very comfortable, but it gives you the
sense of what a house would have been like.
And we know that houses, that beds in houses looked very much like 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, what, the reason this is called the Shields and the
Seats, obviously, 'because it has seats and it has shields on the on the walls.
So
I just wanted to make the point, 'because it'll turn
up a number of times in the course the semester, the
close association in the minds of the Romans between cities
of the houses of the living and houses of the dead.
And also that important point that early
Samnite builders are looking at Etruscan prototypes.
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