The Casa di Octavius Quartio’s collection of sculpture, however, may have been less a result of the taste of the house’s owner than might be assumed. A number of the statuettes in the garden collection show signs of re-use and repair, a phenomenon that Jessica Powers (this volume) has also identified in the Casa degli Amorini Dorati. The Dionysos herm heads were cut down from larger pieces, one of the muses was recut, and the so-called Hercules was likely displayed in the house next door in its initial display. The youthful Dionysos was also repaired in antiquity. The inconsistencies of material, technique, and scale indicate that the suite of sculpture was not created at one time and certainly not by one sculptor; the range of quality and stylistic innovation among the statuettes is so uneven that it is very unlikely that the works were all the products of one workshop. It is possible that the pieces chosen for this house may have been the only ones available to the owner at the time. I suspect that with the destruction of many homes during the earthquake of AD 62, salvaged and subsequently repaired sculptures were commonly reused during the last phase of the city’s existence. These statuettes may have been used by the original owners who displayed them in their own restored homes. Or, with the transitions taking place in the ownership of many houses in Pompeii after the earthquake, those residents leaving the city for safer locales may have either sold their sculptural collections along with their damaged homes to new owners, or simply abandoned the works in the rubble of their houses. The mismatched trapezophoroi from this garden may have been the surviving halves of two complete sets of supports. Among these reused statuettes must have been “heirlooms,” valued for personal, aesthetic, art-historical, or iconographic reasons (Marvin 1989). This sculptural collection might be a good cross-section of the types of statues available at “earthquake sales” in post-AD 62 Pompeii. In other words, this might not be a “willful eclecticism,” but rather an assemblage created from statuary on hand.
The iconographic heterogeneity nevertheless lines up with the eclectic displays at the homes of the very wealthy. Taking the actual availability of specific sculptural types into consideration should be an important aspect in our methodology in studying Roman collecting habits. Using this single collection of statuettes in the Casa di Octavius Quartio as case study, it may be possible to hypothesize that while the many renovation projects in the domestic sphere at Pompeii necessitated the adoption of the most fashionable style of wall painting, patrons were content to dust off and repair the sculpture that had survived the 62 earthquake. Naturally, additional studies on the domestic sculpture from Pompeii are needed to create a more comprehensive picture of the state of artistic production and its economics in the city during its last phase.
World History
