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Ancient Mediterranean + Europe
Course: Ancient Mediterranean + Europe > Unit 9
Lesson 5: Wall painting- Roman wall painting styles
- Empire: Painted Garden, Villa of Livia
- Scenes from Homer’s Odyssey, Via Graziosa
- Still Life with Peaches
- Pompeii: House of the Vettii
- Dionysiac frieze, Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii
- Room M of the Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor, Boscoreale
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Empire: Painted Garden, Villa of Livia
Painted Garden, Villa of Livia, fresco, 30-20 B.C.E. (Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo, Rome) Plant species include: umbrella pine, oak, red fir, quince, pomegranate, myrtle, oleander, date palm, strawberry, laurel, viburnum, holm oak, boxwood, cypress, ivy, acanthus, rose, poppy, chrysanthemum, chamomile, fern, violet, and iris. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- This painting looks in exceptionally great condition for an ancient painting. Has it been restored? If not, how was in preserved so well?(54 votes)
- The painting was in an underground, windowless room (called a "hypogeum" meaning "underground") for 1,800 years before it was discovered. The lack of sunlight and air kept it in good condition. It was recently restored when it was installed in the Museo Nazionale Romano.(41 votes)
- After the painting was complete, would the artist have used any thing to cover the painting as "sealant" as we might today to help preserve his artwork?(10 votes)
- This is a fresco, which means that the pigment was applied to the wall while the plaster was still wet. Then when the pigment dries, it is actually part of the wall. This is probably why frescos have lasted so long. For comparison, Leonardo's Last Supper is not a fresco. It is a mural painted on a dry wall.(12 votes)
- How was this painting moved from the villa to the museum?(11 votes)
- Very carefully. It was moved from the site of the Villa Livia to the Museo Nazionale Romano.(2 votes)
- Am I correct to have interpreted this style of showing perspective to be very sophisticated for this time? I believe I heard that this was not common until the Renaissance. Was this technique once widely used but was then "forgotten" until the Renaissance?(10 votes)
- I was wondering that too. I heard the phrase atmospheric perspective, which seems a great description, but maybe the work wasn't, um, strictly graphically a perspective with smaller-in-the-distance stuff and a vanishing point. Help us?(4 votes)
- From many cultures and different artists, i wonder what type of paint they used to make the room? From a type of plant? mineral? Or a animal?(5 votes)
- Without knowing the real answer, my guess is that the blues came from minerals crushed finely to make the pigment. I'm curious too about the use of plants (berries etc) used as pigment.(3 votes)
- Does the birdcage in a garden with birds in abundant freedom all around serve to remind Livia of her lot in life? Not the lot she should have, but the lot that Caesar wishes upon her?(4 votes)
- Just wondering if we are reading too much into the interpretation, if any, of the bird cage? Could it not be that the artist was painting what he "sees" when imaging such a scene from memory and what he saw was a normal practice of "airing" caged birds that were normally kept indoors?(3 votes)
- Are these birds and plants that are native to the area near Livia's villa, or are they fanciful or imports from other parts of the Empire?(3 votes)
- These appear to be flora and fauna that could easily be part of the landscape around the area at the time. Recognizable trees include an oak (not sure of variety), pomegranate tree with Italian cypress in the background. Birds include what appear to be goldfinches, a white peacock and ravens or crows. All of these could have been from the area at the time, though the white peacock most likely came from India originally, perhaps through Africa and Egypt before arriving at a noble house in Rome.(5 votes)
- Does the acanthus plant still exist today?(3 votes)
- At, could that bird in the cage be an attempt to break or jar, if but momentarily, the freeness and coolness of the art work? 3:45(3 votes)
- Was this painted by one artist or is it possible that several artists were involved in painting it?(2 votes)
Video transcript
STEVEN ZUCKER: It's
a hot day in Rome, but the ancient Romans had
figured out how to stay cool. BETH HARRIS: They did. We're in a room
that reconstructs a room in the villa of Livia. Livia was the wife of
the emperor, Augustus. There was a lovely summer
house, a resort, of sorts. And in the villa,
there was one room that was partially
underground, dug into the rock. STEVEN ZUCKER: Which
meant they would stay much cooler in the summer. BETH HARRIS: And we can
really appreciate that today. STEVEN ZUCKER: But
the sense of coolness would come not only from
the actual temperature, but also from the decoration. BETH HARRIS: From
the very cool colors that this room is painted
in, what the artist did was paint an amazing
illusion of a landscape, a garden, as though the
walls were not walls at all, but views out beyond a fence,
beyond a wall, with trees and bushes and fruits
and plants and birds. STEVEN ZUCKER: It's as if the
walls have literally dissolved, and this is the great example of
the second style of Roman wall painting. BETH HARRIS: The first style
was characterized by an attempt to recreate in paint and stucco
the marble walls that we've decorated Greek palaces. STEVEN ZUCKER: A
kind of faux marble, a kind of trompe l'oeil. BETH HARRIS: Exactly. Now here, instead of
the illusion of marble, the artist has created
an illusion of nature. STEVEN ZUCKER: And it's nature
that spreads out all around us. And it's not a menacing nature. It's a beautiful,
cultivated nature. It's full of playful birds. There's fruit in the trees. There are blossoms everywhere. BETH HARRIS: And there's light. The artist has used
atmospheric perspective, so that the trees and the
leaves that are closest to us are rendered more crisply
than the vegetation in the background. STEVEN ZUCKER: The
only real architecture that's represented
is, as you mentioned, a straw fence, perhaps,
within something that looks a little bit more
substantial, in a pink-gray. The artist has used
that outer wall in order to create a subtle
rendering of perspective. And you can see that,
as the wall reaches out in a couple of places
to enclose trees that are just at the border. BETH HARRIS: So we see
poppies and roses and irises and pomegranates and-- STEVEN ZUCKER: Quince. BETH HARRIS: So there's a real
sense of variety in the plants, in the flowers, in the fruit, in
the types of birds that we see, in the positions of the birds--
some with their wings stretched back, some sitting
quietly, some in the sky. There's a real search for
the variety of nature. My favorite part
is on this one tree that is framed by that
pinkish-gray wall. The branches move in
exactly the haphazard way that a tree grows. And then there are
places where we see light on the leaves and
branches and other places where the leaves are in shadow. STEVEN ZUCKER: It seems
as if, actually, there's a breeze that's come up. And it's blown some
of those leaves over, so that we're seeing the
more silvery underside. And then we get
the darker shadows of the tops of the leaves. So there's this real
sense of the momentary, and of this being a
breezy, beautiful day. BETH HARRIS: Yeah,
you can almost hear the leaves
rustle in the wind. STEVEN ZUCKER: I think my
favorite plant is probably the acanthus that grows
up around a pine on one of the short sides of the room. And probably the other element
that I find most interesting is that in this open-air space,
there is perched precariously on that outer wall a bird cage. Now, throughout
this entire room, there are paintings
of birds that are free, and flying
through the open sky. But here we have
a bird in a cage. And it reminds me, as
I stand in this room, that although these walls have
dissolved, I'm still inside.