In order to examine the ways in which porticus and cryptoporticus accommodated daily life in villas and tackle their meaning and function in villa architecture, the activities that Cicero and Pliny the Younger describe as taking place in them must be examined. Although not all villa owners would have engaged in the tightly scheduled intellectual occupations that Cicero and Pliny the Younger offer, they give us an understanding of the daily rhythm in villas (Laidlaw 1968, 50—52; Leach 2003, 154-165).
An examination of Pliny the Younger’s letters shows that villa owners passed some hours of their day working (whether work was an intellectual activity or not), walking, or sitting and relaxing in open-air promenades (usually called xystus, cf. Vitr. DeArch. 5.11.4; 6.7.5), which were shaded by the adjacent, or nearby, porticus or cryptoporticus:
I wake when I like, usually after sunrise, often earlier but rarely later. My shutters stay closed, for in the stillness and darkness I feel myself surprisingly detached from any distractions and left to myself in freedom; my eyes do not determine the direction of my thinking, but, being unable to see anything, they are guided to visualize my thoughts. If I have anything on hand I work it out in my head, choosing and correcting the wording, and the amount I achieve depends on the ease or difficulty with which my thoughts can be marshaled and kept in my head. Then I call my secretary, the shutters are opened, and I dictate what I have put into shape; he goes out, is recalled, and again dismissed. Three or four hours after I first wake [but I don’t keep to fixed times] I betake myself according to the weather either to the xystus or to the cryptoporticus, work out the rest of my subject and dictate it. (Plin. Ep. 9.36, 1-3).
As in the description of the above-ground cryptoporticus of his Laurentine villa (Ep. 2.17, 16-19), here again Pliny defines the function of the cryptoporticus on the basis of its environmental qualities: the decisive factor for preferring cryptoporticus to xystus was the weather, otherwise both structures provided comparable workspaces for the owner.
An examination of the cryptoporticus and porticus in Villa Arianna A and Villa A at Oplontis indicates
The ways in which they accommodated work space for the owners. In Villa Arianna A (Fig. 3.3), cryptoporticus 71 was located in between garden area V and crypta-ramp 76 that led to the sea through a series of ramps cutting through the substructures of the villa’s platform (spaces 76—61, 62, 68). The windows on both sidewalls of cryptoporticus 71, a series of wide conical-shaped windows along the southwest wall and two wide funnel-shaped windows along the northeast one, provided for air circulation, a concern that Pliny the Younger (Ep. 2.17, 16—19) expressed in the description of his Laurentine villa. The southwest windows invited the warm setting sun inside the cryptoporticus, while the northeast windows allowed the fresh breeze coming through the crypta-ramp (76, 61) from the sea to reach the space. The southwest side of cryptoporticus 71 opened onto a porticus (73), which had a different orientation than cryptoporticus 71 and was aligned with another porticus (U) at the other side of the garden (V) (Nappo 2002b, 53; 56—57). Here, the owner had a choice between cryptoporticus 71 and porticus 73 in which to conduct his/her work.
Likewise, in Villa A at Oplontis (Fig. 3.1) the owner could choose from the numerous porticus and cryptoporticus to conduct his work: between cryptoporticus 13 and 24, and porticus 40 looking to the south, porticus 60 looking to the east, porticus 56 and 76 looking west and porticus 33 and 34 facing north. The choice of one porticus and/or cryptoporticus over another would have depended not only on the weather, but also on the mood and personal taste of the owner. For example, porticus 33 and 34, facing north and having a smaller width and extent, would have been preferred on the hottest days of the summer or when the owners sought some privacy from the noise of the household, concerns that Pliny the Younger (Ep. 2.17, 18; 5.6, 21) expressed in his villa letters. By providing more than one space with similar environmental qualities, but with different extents and contexts, designer(s) not only emulated the monumental character of public architecture but also provided a number of choices for the daily life in villas.
Going for a walk was an intrinsic part of the daily life of otium in villas (O’Sullivan 2003, 38; 2006; Leach 2003, 160-165; 2004, 37). Owners with their friends would go for leisure walks in the cryptoporticus, porticus and xystus in order to exercise or to engage in philosophical discussions. For example, Pliny the Younger (Ep. 9.36, 1-3), continuing the description of his summer days in his villa in Tuscany cited previously, went for a walk after finishing the dictation of the piece on which he was working since he woke up:
I go for a drive, and spend the time in the same way as when walking or lying down; my powers of concentration do not flag and are in fact refreshed by the change. After a short sleep and another walk I read a Greek or a Latin speech aloud with emphasis, not so much for the sake of my voice as my digestion, though of course both are strengthened by this. Then I have another walk, am oiled, take exercise, and have a bath. If I am dining alone with my wife or with a few friends, a book is read aloud during the meal and afterwards we listen to a comedy or some music; then I walk again with the members of my household, some of whom are well educated. Thus the evening is prolonged with varied conversation, and even when the days are at their longest, comes to a satisfying end (Plin. Ep. 9.36, 3-4).
As Pliny the Younger’s description indicates, for the longer walks villa owners went with carriages outside their estates. For their shorter walks however, after a mid-day nap, after reading for digestion, after taking exercise and after dinner, owners may have used the numerous long walkways (porticus, cryptoporticus and xystus) inside the villas.
A quick count of the total length of the walkways in Villa Arianna A and Villa of the Papyri is indicative. In Villa Arianna A the big peristyle garden H-W (Fig. 3.3) provided a colonnaded walkway at least 320m long around the rectangular garden and in Villa of the Papyri the big peristylium-garden (57-61; Fig. 3.4) provided a 280m long colonnaded walkway around the rectangular garden. Walking would indeed give a functional justification to the proliferation of these elements in luxury villa architecture (Fig. 3.7). These colonnaded walkways would have provided shaded and pleasant areas for all the hours of the day (Blanas 1990; Fortsch 1993, 45-47; Zarmakoupi 2008, 271-272). In Villa A at Oplontis (Fig. 3.1), porticus 60 and porticus 56, surrounding the east wing of the villa, provided
Fig. 3.7 — Herculaneum, Villa of the Papyri, bird’s eye view of digital model.
Fig. 3.8 — Oplontis, Villa A: view of porticus 40 enclosing garden 59.
Walks for different times of the day: porticus 56 at the west side for the morning hours, when the rooms behind it provided shade from the rising sun, and porticus 60 at the east side for the evening hours, when the rooms behind it provided shade from the setting sun. Both walks were equally pleasing, the one along the big park-like garden, the other along the swimming pool (96) and garden (98). Room 69
Provided access from one to the other and provided ventilation for both, a concern that is expressed by Pliny (Ep. 2.17, 17). The cryptoporticus 13 — cryptoporticus 24 — porticus 40 sequence protected the villa’s south-facing interior spaces during the summer and provided a chain of walkways with a view to the seascape (Figs. 3.6, 3.8). In Villa San Marco at Stabiae, several porticus (20, 5a, 5b, 3) formed a U-shaped enclosure that confined a garden (9) with a pool (15) in the middle (Figs.
3.2, 3.5). These provided a walkway protected from the west and thus suitable for the evening hours, while cryptoporticus open to the southeast (7, 51) provided walks suitable for the midday and those porticus open to the west (1, 2) were suitable for the morning hours.
An examination of the construction dates ofporticus and cryptoporticus in the aforementioned examples indicates that these structures appear after the middle of the first century BC and become very popular at the beginning of the first century AD. In Villa of the Papyri, the peristylium-garden (57—61) and the cryptoporticus (56) to its southwest were added towards the end of the first century BC (Wojcik 1986, 35—38). In Villa Arianna A, cryptoporticus 71 dates from the Augustan period and the big peristylium-garden from the Claudio-Neronian period (Bonifacio and Sodo 2001, 155—166; Nappo 2002b, 54—57). In Villa A at Oplontis the porticus (33—34) and cryptoporticus (13, 24) around the atrium core were constructed during the Augustan period, while the porticus and cryptoporticus of the east wing (40, 46, 56, 60) were built towards the middle of the first century AD (Fergola and Pagano 1998, 30-31; 49; 56-57; 60-62; 66-68; Fergola 2000, 23-24; Thomas and Clarke 2007, 226-232). In Villa San Marco, porticus (1, 2), actually date from the Augustan period, but only became parts of the villa during the Claudio-Neronian period. In this period the owner of Villa San Marco took possession of the villa next-door, to which porticus (1, 2) originally belonged, and connected porticus 1 and 2 to porticus 3 through ramp 4 (Rougetet 1999, 53; 56). It is during the same period that the owner added the arch-shaped cryptoporticus (62, 63) with the nymphaeum (64, 65) facing and also porticus 51 at the southeast (Blanc 2002, 81). In this way the owner probably tripled the length of walkways within his villa - if one judges from the size of the remains - and created a monumental villa fapade.
As owners enlarged their properties, designers used the porticus structures to augment the monumental character of the villas and to provide spaces that accommodated the owners’ daily activities. In doing so, I propose, designers modified the design of the porticus and created the cryptoporticus as an alternative in the daily life in villas: a walkway that had closed walls, instead of an open-air colonnaded walkway (xystus or porticus), the air, light and temperature of which could be regulated, and in which owners could work or walk protected from the elements. As it has been already addressed, Pliny the Younger’s (Ep. 2.17, 16-19; cf. Ep. 9.7, 4) descriptions emphasize the importance of the environmental qualities of the cryptoporticus and indicate that a cryptoporticus would have been used instead of an open-air walkway because of the protection it offered from the elements (Ep. 9.36, 3). It is possible that this period of rebuilding and appropriating properties gave designers the opportunity to develop an architectural solution to the owners’ evolving needs and the term crypto-porticus was coined to describe it.
We cannot ascertain whether the precedents of the crypoporticus structure were found in the Hellenistic architecture in Asia Minor (Luschin 2002, 24-28), however, as Luschin’s (2002, 15-16) analysis has shown, the cryptoporticus structure did bear similarities to the covered passageway around the Nile ship of Ptolemy IV. It is probable that Roman designers were fascinated with the architecture of travel just as Le Corbusier (1923, 76) in the 20th century was interested in the steam-powered ocean liners, the lay-out of which he emulated in his designs (e. g., Villa Savoye).
World History
