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5.5 Additional Pompeian Houses
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Roman Architecture
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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
>> Now I also wanted to show you, that's not the only mosaic in Pompeii.
It's the greatest, by far.
And it's, 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, of ancient Greek and Roman art.
But there are plenty of other mos, 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 at the site than the Alexander mosaic.
Which after all, you can't see on the site.
You have to see it in Naples, or 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 AD.
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, tesserae is 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 bearing his teeth.
And the whole point, Cave Canum, 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 i-, actually, for Antiquity.
And you can, I bet you can tell me where in the house this mosaic was located.
Neil. >> fauces.
>> In the, in the vestibulum or the fauces of the house.
Yeah, probably the vestibulum actually.
But indeed, the vestibulum of the house, so that even before you got in,
as far as the fauces, you were warned, that you better beware of the dog.
And this thing, I mean you will see this, any of
you've been to Pompeii know this, and can attest that I'm right.
Every single souvenir stand, anywhere, within any,
any numbers of yards of Pompeii is selling
the Cave Canum on everything you can possibly imagine.
The mugs, the T-shirts, the hotplates, the whatever, the tote bags,
you can get the Cave Canum in every shape, size, and possibility.
And I have one of those, myself.
Only one, only one hotplate, but that's it.
I, I, I, I did it, [LAUGH] 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 some
a few small points. well, important points.
Important point or two about each of them.
The first one is the House of Menander, in Pompeii.
Which dates to the second century BC and later.
You see it in plan here.
The House of the 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 dinning 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 you know, 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 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 chain over there on
one of the walls of the house.
The, 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, the cubicola opening off either side.
But also because of the incorporation just as in the House
of the Fawn, of columns elsewhere, than just in the peristyle.
These in that transition place between the atrium and
the 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, and we're back in the atrium again.
You can see the way in which the cubicola, the small cubicola, open off that.
You can see some of the paintings.
And here's the entrance way 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 wanted to treat fleetingly.
It's the so-called House
of Pansa in Pompeii and it dates to the second century BC.
And it's a very large house as you can see, like all the
other, Hellenized Domus, because we see when
it has a peristyle with columns, here.
it, 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, the dining room.
And a,
a bevy of shops down here.
In fact, more shops then we have seen a be the
case and most of the houses we've looked at a, at least
5 if not 6 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 is a pool, in between the columns.
And you might speculate, oh how nice, you know a nice pleasant pool,
you could sit around, you could you know dip your hands
or your feet into that pool, 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 one 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, who's 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 have been vegetables and
fruits and so on, that were, that were gardened here.
And then you, 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, you know,
this stuccoed over at the bottom, with the paint.
You can see in this case, remains of the red
paint that would have decorated the bottom part of those columns.
Another very interesting house well, you know, interesting
house and one that's important for us because it
marks a a later development in Roman house architecture
in Pompeii, is the house of Marcus Loreius Tiburtinus.
Remember Tiber was the ancient word for Tivoli.
And so it's likely that Tiburtinas, 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 AD.
Like the House of the Fawn it took up an entire city block.
And but you can see that the owner has
made a different decision than the owner of the
House of the Fawn, 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, there's 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 Pompeiians began to build second stories on their houses.
they, they began to ex-, 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 on to the compluvium of
the, 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, of arch,
interesting architectural forms that for that, 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 the city, but villas that located either outside the
city or along, or along the coast, or along the coast And 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 a
two columns, Corinthian columns with a, 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 and 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 pretention toward things Greek.
But most important, this sort of, 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 life styles
of the rich and famous, as this, as this lecture is called.
We begin to see that in some of the houses, especially in the later period.
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