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The Boscoreale Figure-Paintings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

Martin Robertson
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Extract

The interpretation of the figure-scenes from the big hall of the villa of Publius Fannius Synistor, near Boscoreale, built and decorated probably soon after the middle of the first century B.C., has been much discussed during the half-century since their discovery. No theory yet put forward, however, has met with general acceptance; and indeed there is no general agreement on the question whether the characters are taken from Greek religious mythology, Hellenistic history, or Roman daily life. The theory here advanced is in many points conjectural, but it does, I think, take one step forward on solid ground. If that step be accepted, it becomes virtually certain that the subject is historical.

The surviving figures and groups have been wrenched from their decorative setting, which has been largely destroyed; but it was described and partly drawn by Barnabei, and its character and place in the decoration of the villa as a whole have been admirably interpreted by Beyen.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1-2 , November 1955 , pp. 58 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Martin Robertson 1955. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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References

1 F. Barnabei, La Villa Pompeiana di P. Fannio Sinistore, 1901, 51 ff., fig. 11; reproduced by P. W. Lehmann, Roman Wall-paintings from Boscoreale in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1953, 29, fig. 24; see also her figs. 25, 26. The old photographs in Barnabei's book are in many ways more satisfactory than those in Mrs. Lehmann's, but the two sets complement one another. I disagree with Mrs. Lehmann's theories, but her book is invaluable, and forms with Barnabei's the basis for any study of the material. A review of the book is published below, pp. 195 f.

2 H. G. Beyen, Die Pompeianische Wanddekoration vom zweiten bis vierten Stil, 1938, 212 ff.

3 Lehmann, 25 ff.

4 Lehmann, 28 and 32, fig. 27; Barnabei, pl. VIII; Schefold, Pompeianische Malerei, pl. 4.

5 Compare Schefold, l.c., pls. 2 and 3 (Item), with e.g. 9 (House of Livia on the Palatine) or 12 (Villa under the Farnesina).

6 Most clearly seen in Barnabei, pl. IX.

7 Barnabei, 53, fig. 11; Lehmann, 29 f., figs. 24–6.

8 Barnabei, 54; see below.

9 Lehmann, 63, has shown that Barnabei, 55 n. 1, makes this certain, and that the ‘reconstruction’, Sambon, Les Fresques de Boscoreale, 1903, 12, reproduced by Beyen and others, is false.

9a So Mrs. Lehmann, from study of the original. Studniczka (below, n. 16), working from photographs, took the man to be seated on a throne, the woman on a stool beside it; and Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer tells me that from personal observations he takes the same view. The New York paintings I know only from publications, and from photographs, very kindly sent me by Dr. von Bothmer. From these I doubt if certainty is possible on this point.

10 Barnabei, pll. v, vi, and 57, fig. 12; Lehmann, pll. I–VII; Pfuhl, Malerei und Zeichnung der Griechen, figs. 716 f. (central and left-hand panels only); and often elsewhere.

11 Barnabei, pll. VII and VII; Lehmann, 32, fig. 27; Schefold, l.c. pl. 4; Pfuhl, l.c. fig. 718 (left-hand panel only); and often elsewhere.

12 Barnabei, 54 ff.

13 With the young Atthis ?—σμικρά μοι πάις ἔμμεν᾿ ἐφαίνεο κἄχαρις. But the child is a real problem; see below.

14 Lehmann, 37 ff.

15 AJA 57, 238; an analogous idea in Pfuhl, l.c. 11, 879.

16 JdI 38–9 (1923–4), 64 ff.

17 Hill, Principal Coins of the Greeks, pl. 36, 13–15. My thanks are due to the Trustees of the British Museum for permission to publish the photograph in fig. (a).

18 Pausanias X, 18, 7.

19 Schefold, l.c., pl. 48; Pfuhl, l.c., fig. 659; and constantly. In the corresponding picture (Theseus victorious over the Minotaur) the female sitting with bow and arrow at the top left is called Artemis by Pfuhl and Schefold; but the goddess has no part in the story, and the old interpretation as a personification of Crete, famous for bowmen, is far preferable.

20 The Roman province of Macedonia appears personified, and wearing the καυσία without diadem, on Imperial coins; see J. M. C. Toynbee, The Hadrianic School, 122 f.

21 Lehmann, 54, and 53, fig. 36.

22 See especially Robinson, E. S. G., in Num. Chron. 1948 (VIII), 49Google Scholar. The distinction hardly holds for the figures of the Darius vase, but as A. S. F. Gow has shown (JHS 48, 148), this is not a reliable document for Persian constume.

23 Arrian, , Anabasis, VII, 4, 7Google Scholar.

24 Athenaeus XII, 538; Chares fr. 4.

25 Athenaeus 1, 17; Duris, fr. 49.

26 Studniczka, l.c. (n. 16), 97. See also Hill, , JHS 43 (1903), 156 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 JHS 71, pl. 11a and b, 12a and c.

28 Seleucus alone of the Successors could claim at one moment, just before his death, to be the ruler of Alexander's empire, excluding Egypt, but including both Persia and Macedonia, though he had not actually taken possession of the latter.

29 Lehmann 74, n. 185. Catullus LXI, 10. Yellow shoes are, however, common in Pompeian painting.

30 Lehmann 51, fig. 33.

31 See the Athenaeus/Chares fragment cited above, p. 62, n. 24.

32 Rostovtzeff, Dura-Europos and its Art, 1938, pl. 1, 2. On female river-figures from the same part of the world see Toynbee, l.c., 16 f. City-figures do not always wear the turreted crown : two of the four from the Esquiline treasure (BM Cat. Early Christian Antiquities, pl. 20) are helmeted. Cf. also the Tyche of Commagene, who wears a veil over a flower-and fruit wreath in the colossal statues below the Tumulus of Antiochus at Nemrud Dagh (ILN 18th June, 1955, 1095, figs. 4 and 5; 1096, figs. 6 and 11). The standing Tyche of Melos (Furtwangler, Masterpieces 382 f., figs. 167 f.) carried a child and seems not to have worn the city-crown.

33 I owe the suggestion of Nomos to Professor T. B. L. Webster.

34 Plutarch, De Alexandri Fortuna sive Virtute, 1, 7. Tarn, Alexander the Great, passim; the other view, Wilcken, Alexander der Grosse, 194 f., Meiggs in Bury, History of Greece, 3rd edition, 1951, 898, n. to 817.

35 Schefold, Die Bildnisse der antiken Dichter usw., 1943, 108 f. Epicurus: Pfuhl, l.c. II, 879. Menedemus: Studniczka, see p. 61, n. 16 above; Schefold, l.c. 132, Pompeianische Malerei, 49. It is not inconceivable that he should be both a portrait and a personification—say Zeno personifying Nomos; and the figures of Macedonia and Persia might also be portraits, e.g. of the two mothers, both figures who were remembered, Olympias and the elder Statira.

36 Lehmann, 35, n. 31, with refs.

37 Arrian VII, 11, 3. For the introduction of a similar idea into a work of art, compare the picture on Alexander's catafalque (as described by Diodorus Siculus XVIII, 27), which showed him enthroned in a chariot, on one side of him men of the Macedonian, on the other of the Persian bodyguard.

38 Pliny, , NH xxxiv, 92Google Scholar.

39 Lehmann 24, n. 4.

40 Vitruvius VI, 3, 8 ff.

41 J. M. C. Toynbee, JRS 19, 67 ff.; Bieber, M., Review of Religion II, 1937, 10 ffGoogle Scholar.

42 Schefold, l.c. 48.

43 Barnabei, 54.

44 Lehmann, 63 ff. and 144 f., pl. VIII A and B; 29 f., figs. 24, 26.

45 Lehmann, 64.

46 E. 316; BM Cat. III, pl. 12; CVA BM fasc. 5 (G.B. 7) III, 1, C, pl. 58, 1 (a); Pfuhl, l.c., fig. 513. Already compared by Sambon, l.c., 16 (with fig.). Obscure subject: seated Athena, standing woman, air of gloom; again conceivably the rejected goddesses, an excerpt from the Judgment of Paris.

47 Lucian, Herod, sive Aëtion, 4; Overbeck, Schriftquellen, 1938. Modern scholarship tends to see the marriage with Roxane as no less political than that with Statira, but tradition from Aëtion on has treated it romantically as the soldier's lovematch.

48 Alterthümer von Pergamon VII, pl. 8; Winter, , Kunstgeschichte in Bildern I, 11–12, 372, 1Google Scholar.

49 A relief from Pergamum (Alt. VII, 2, 284, no. 358, Beiblatt 36; Winter, l.c., 364, 3), with an obscure subject treated in a pictorial style, looks as though it were derived from a painting of the same kind as the originals of the Boscoreale works.

50 Lehmann, 144.