Jessica Powers
At the beginning of his book on painting, Pliny the Elder remarks that this once-noble art has been replaced by extravagant marblework, including “inlaid marble and thin marble slabs patterned in the shapes of objects and animals” and that “we have even begun to paint on stone” (HN 35.2—3). In the same vein, Seneca faults the owners of lavish contemporary houses, whose walls were decorated in marble and “gleamed with large, precious mirrors” (Ep. 86.6). Though Pliny and Seneca criticize these and other excesses of domestic architecture, the implication is that such forms of decoration were increasingly popular when they wrote (see Drerup 1957; Edwards 1993, 137—172; Leach 2004, 167—176). Pompeii’s houses offer an opportunity to explore how homeowners selected and deployed these sumptuous features. In this essay I examine the use of such “wall ornaments” in ten houses as well as a bakery. By the term “wall ornament” (in German, Wandemblema), I mean objects in precious materials set into the plaster of painted walls: the wall ornaments are individual items, not to be confused with marble revetment and other forms of decoration applied to large areas of the wall. Marble sculptures make up the majority of wall ornaments in Pompeii; others include pieces of obsidian and glass; panels fashioned of gold glass, cameo glass, and intarsia (pieces of slate inlaid with designs rendered in colored stone); and a painting on marble.
Wall ornaments survive in small numbers and have accordingly received relatively little attention in publications on Roman domestic decor. The only previous overviews of the genre appear in Heide Froning’s study of mythological reliefs (1981, 8—32), in which she discusses wall ornaments as comparisons for the sculptures that are her focus, and in Eva Dubois-Pelerin’s recent work on private luxury in Roman Italy (2007; 2008). In addition, Froning (1981), Bonanni (1998) and Dubois-Pelerin (2007; 2008) each survey the relevant ancient literary sources. Several of the wall ornaments I present here have been included in publications of specific genres, including mask reliefs (Cain 1988) and oscilla (Dwyer 1981), cameo glass (Goldstein 1982; Painter and Whitehouse 1990), intarsia (Dohrn 1965; Bonanni 1998), and painted marble (Mielsch 1979; Von Graeve 1984). While these studies focus on important issues of dating, stylistic development and workshop identification, they consequently tend to treat the objects in isolation, independent of their ancient settings, owners and viewers.
I take a new approach by focusing on the wall ornaments in their display contexts and on the patrons who acquired them. In each house I consider the relations between these features and their surroundings. This investigation reveals the care with which homeowners integrated wall ornaments into the overall decorative ensembles of
The spaces they adorned. I begin with the Casa degli Amorini dorati (VI 16, 7.38), which had eighteen wall ornaments, more than any other house yet discovered in Pompeii. The ornaments incorporated into the walls when the principal rooms were repainted following the earthquake of AD 62 — obsidian plaques, marble sculptures, and a set of exquisite gold-glass medallions — include rare and imported objects as well as sculptures reused from other settings. Like the owners of the Casa degli Amorini dorati, other homeowners employed items fashioned from a range of striking materials and acquired from sources near and far as wall ornaments. The wall ornaments thus reflect important aspects of the collecting habits of Pompeii’s homeowners: an ability to acquire imported objects, a desire to curate and preserve antiques, and a willingness to display reused and even damaged pieces in creative new ways. The patrons’ interests appear not only in the wall ornaments but also in other features of their houses, including floor pavements and freestanding sculpture displays, and the wider esteem for such decor is further reflected in the painted imitations of wall ornaments that decorated houses both in Campania and in Rome.
World History
