The collection of statuettes from this house gives us valuable information about consumer taste in the last phase of the city of Pompeii. As the decoration of Roman homes was never mere decoration, but part of a semantic dialogue between the house’s owner and his visitors, the sculpture of the Casa di Octavius Quartio played a role in affirming the owner’s status and position within the community of Pompeian elite — or aspiration to membership within it (Wallace-Hadrill 1994; Hales 2003; Petersen 2006).
The upper canal area of the Casa di Octavius Quartio was apparently an important part of the house, designed for receiving guests and dining. The combination of landscape features, waterworks, paintings, and sculpture created a multimedia atmosphere designed to impress and inspire. Taking a wide view of the garden as a whole is the best way to interpret this collection of statuettes. One should not place too much importance on any one piece of this orchestrated landscape, as there was, in fact, an extraordinary amount of competing imagery. No single statuette would have been the focus of concentration as wall paintings, fountains, and perhaps even food and entertainers vied for the viewer’s attention. The overall plan seems to have been guided by the following principle: variety is valued over consistency of subject.
Bearing that in mind, the assemblage of ten statuettes along the upper canal was probably meant to evoke a rustic, untamed landscape, populated by wild animals as well as members of the Bacchic thiasos. The wall paintings in this area of the house also contribute to the bucolic allusion. Two large panels illustrating hunt scenes among animals decorated the wall to the north of the canal, creating something of a stage set for the viewing experience. Two popular myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses flanked the biclinium niche with Pyramus and Thisbe on the right and Narcissus on the left. Although the moral message of these paintings should not be underestimated, it is important to note that both of these scenes take place in rural settings. Dionysos, satyrs, and even the muses were at home in a bucolic environment.
The built, painted, and landscaped setting for these statuettes may have been designed with the intention of creating a natural oasis in a somewhat busy urban area, engineering the illusion of a more peaceful and uncomplicated time. The designer of a garden such as this one becomes the landscape architect’s version of Virgil, fashioning a visual Eclogue with statuettes and paintings. Bettina Bergmann (2002) convincingly outlined the varied implications of nature imagery in Roman villas like that at Oplontis; allusions to wilderness might have been even more significant in urban houses where noisy neighbors and commercial activities could have created less-than-pastoral surroundings. In contrast to Zanker’s (1998, 168-174) argument that the use of sculpture in the homes of Pompeii’s last phase was a hollow, imitative action, the predominance of bucolic imagery in these houses might have instead had great importance for the city’s residences as they created a bit of rus in urbe as an escape from urban life.
A number of scholars have questioned the appropriateness of the garden’s decoration and have derided it with parallels to Disneyland or kitsch (Zanker 1979, 480; 1998, 156; Clarke 1991, 207; La Rocca, Coarelli and De Vos 2002, 249), based largely upon a desire to see coherent decorative schemes and life-size sculpture, even in the home of a “middle class” Roman. Those who have argued that Roman homeowners followed even loosely-organized iconography-based principles governing domestic decor might wonder, for example, why the sphinx would be placed in a presumably erroneous position away from the other Egyptianizing statuettes (Clarke 1991, fig. 114). The point, however, seems moot as thematic eclecticism appears to have been a motivating rationale for the displays in many Roman gardens. I suggest that he or she who selected and displayed the figures was motivated by a need to “cover a lot of bases.” In other words, with the pervasive social pressure to decorate one’s residence with imagery that created the aura of an educated, wealthy, and tradition-aware Roman, no single genre or subject matter was sufficient. This eclectic ensemble, while superficially without a sole iconographical message, conveyed meaning through its very heterogeneity. Such heterogeneous taste can be observed even in sculptural ensembles of the very wealthy; neither Tiberius’ grotto at Sperlonga nor Hadrian’s “Canopus” at his Tibur villa present discrete iconographic programs. Even the luxurious collection of marble and bronze statues from the Villa dei Papyri at Herculaneum presents “mixed messages” relating to Greece’s historical past, athletics, ancient “masterpieces” (i. e., art for art’s sake), and wild animals.
Such thematic heterogeneity is a common trait in the decoration of well-appointed Pompeian homes and perhaps speaks to the desire of the city’s wealthiest residents to showcase their interest in the plural concerns of the intellectual and economic elite of Rome (see Myers 2005 for a discussion of the cerebral and restful roles of the Roman villa). By displaying objects which alluded to the mythological past, literature, the theatre, exotic provinces, the Dionysiac thiasos, and so forth, a Pompeian homeowner effectively asserted his or her Romanitas. That is to say, the decoration of a home could be an “apparent embodiment of Roman culture” and a vehicle through which the owner made evident the shared cultural interests that characterized the Roman upper class (Hales 2003, 5—8). It is my opinion that an iconographically (and perhaps stylistically) eclectic decorative ensemble would have been the most effective means for conveying this sense of belonging. As such, the sculptural collection of the Casa di Octavius Quartio can be viewed as a primer for the kinds of motifs not only common, but necessary, in well-appointed Pompeian homes, according to the unwritten guidelines of domestic decor. Comparison with similar collections will demonstrate that heterogeneous subjects in one’s decor was the standard in these residences and not, as some have argued, an example of “bad taste.”
World History
