Good morning, everyone. As you can see from today's lecture title, we're going to be talking about painting palaces and villas, in the first century AD. But, I could also call this lecture, a lecture on third and fourth style Roman wall painting because we're going to continue our conversation today about the four architectural styles of Roman wall painting. In order to, in order to do that I just want to remind you of what we talked about last time. We covered the first and second styles of Roman wall painting, and you'll remember that what they had in common is that they both tried to create an illusion of what they weren't, in a sense. Think back to the first style of Roman wall painting when the painters tried to transform a rubble wall into a marble wall, to create the illusion that it was indeed a marble wall rather than a rubble wall, And in the case of the second style, and I show you two examples, again, of that here. The, the, from the villa. The detail from the villa of Publius Fannius Sinistor. On the left-hand side of the screen. Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And the House of Augustus the room of the masks and the House of Augustus on the Palatine Hill in Rome. Both examples of 2nd style Roman wall painting and we saw in this instance that the illusion was to create the sense that you were looking through a window to transform, once again, the rubble wall into a window. A window that showed what might lie outside the villa, in the peristyle court for example. Remember this one with the, shrine or tholos that is surrounded by blue sky and looks like it is located perhaps in a domestic peristyle. And then over here this window that opens onto a sacro-idyllic landscape. We are being beckoned into that sacro-idyllic landscape to explore the sacred items within it and even beyond. So opening up these walls illusionistically, to create an illusion in both, but in the case of the second style, to open the wall up illusionistically as a panoramic window. We also explored the fact that in the second style, the Roman designers, the Roman painters, seem to have experimented with one point linear perspective. This perspective in which all points recede to a single point in the distance, and that we see that use of one-point perspective in the second style wall paintings in the Room of the Masks. We also talked about the relationship between second style Roman wall painting and theatrical architecture. That they may have been looking at actual theaters, possibly in wood, possibly in other more permanent materials that no longer survive, or they may have been creating this in part out of whole cloth. So this connection to the theater and the one last point that I want to remind you of is the fact that we also discussed that although there's an enormous respect for earlier Greek architecture, not only in these paintings but in the temples and in the cities and in the sanctuaries that we've already explored, and we see the Roman painters using those elements of Greek architecture, columns and pediments and the like, in the second style. We also see that they are beginning to break the rules. They have a respect for Greek architecture, but they're all also willing to bend The rules, an example being of course, their use of the triangular pediment here, but they have broken that triangular pediment apart to reveal the tholos here. This is a very important development, and we saw it already, also in the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, where you'll remember the column capitals in the ramp and how they slanted those column capitals in a a way that Greek architects never would have done we see that same sort of breaking of the rules here it's extremely important because it shows again although they revered the past they were willing to look forward to the future and we're going to see especially in the late 1st century A.D. into the 2nd century A.D. further exploration of that kind of thing, and it's going to have a huge impact on Roman architecture. In order to explore the third and fourth styles, I, I need to go to a couple of other cities than the ones we've looked at thus far. I have the map here once again that shows Campania. We are going to be looking at the city of, or a a villa in the town of Oplontis, which you see here. We'll also be looking at an important villa at Boscotrecase and you can see the proximity of those two to the sites that we've already discussed. Pompeii, Herculaneum, Boscoreale. And also, Naples up here. I want to look first at a villa. Or the paintings at a villa. At Oplontis. This villa, and you see a plan of it here, appears to have been, belong to a woman by the name of Poppaea, P-O-P-P-A-E-A. P-O-P-P-A-E-A. Who was Poppaea? Poppaea was first the mistress, and then the wife of Rome's notorious Emperor Nero. Initially, it looked as if the two were soul mates because she seemed to have as much as, of a mean streak as he did, in that she encouraged him quite avidly to murder his mother. To murder his early, his first wife and even to murder the philosopher Seneca. But despite the fact that they seemed to have been soul mates Nero turned against her and in fact when she announced to him that she was pregnant, he kicked her in the stomach which caused her death. But after her death, he took advantage of her death and divinized her, made her a diva, for his own political purposes. So a very interesting saga, here, between Nero and his wife Poppaea. The reason that we think Poppaea owned this villa, or lived in this villa at some point, and the villa dates we believe to 20 to 10 BC. The reason we believe that she lived there is that there was an amphora, one of these terracotta pots that was found in the excavation, with the name of a Freedman of Poppaea, which suggests that she may well have lived there. The other interesting observation that archaeologists made when they excavated this particular house is that it look like it had been empty at the time of the eruption of the Vesuvius when it had been indeed covered over with ash and lava. And they also found a lot of tools lying around the house, which led to their belief that the house was probably in the process of being renovated, it may have suffered damage in the earthquake, and was in the process of being renovated before reused at the time Vesuvius struck. If we look at this very good plan of what is preserved of this villa today. We can pick out a number of features that we've already become accustomed to in our study of Roman domestic architecture, houses, and villas. We can see peristyle courts with columns for example. We notice here the very large atrium with the impluvium designated here in plan. There was a kitchen, an extensive kitchen over here as well. We also see the use of columns, these column aids that are, that are part of peristyles in some cases. But also our colonnades that look out from the villa toward what, what, what surrounds it, the landscape and the sea and so on that surround it. And it's another example of what we began to see in the second phase of the plan of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. And that is an opening up of the facade, a, an, an incorporation of a larger number of windows to make the facade lighter and more airy. As well as a series of colonnades with spectacular views. Toward what lay outside the villa. The most important room for us today, is room number eight. Over here. And that room is part of an interior bath. An elaborate interior bath that was part of this villa and room number eight, which is basically a rectangular room as you can see here, was the caldarium, or the warm room of that bath and it has some very interesting paintings that will, show us the transition between what we know of a second-style Roman wall painting, and what we term third-style Roman wall painting. This is a view of the villa as it looks today. You can see like Herculaneum, it is very closely surrounded by, modern apartment houses and so on. Here you see it, it's only again part of what the original villa was, but even from this view you can get a sense of how open it was compared to those very enclosed, severe, domus italica houses that we began with. You see here this opening up, views through columns, both and doorways, but also these peristyle courts and colonnaded ports and so on, that again, give this very open open appearance which is part of again this important development toward that kind of openness, the house has in the villa has in it both 2nd and 3rd style Roman wall paintings which again makes it extremely interesting because it is clear that there was some transitioning here from one style to the other. And I should mention, by the way, that with regard to the first, second, and third and fourth styles they weren't necessarily an evolution, a development from one point to another. By that I mean, I don't think the painters or the patrons necessarily had in mind we're going to start at point A and get to point D, eventually. I think that what we're dealing with here as we talk about this chronological evolution is a transition of styles that had something to do in part probably with fashion. With fashion for a particular way of decorating things and of course with influences that were coming in from other parts of the world. And in fact as far as this transition from the second to the third style this, this, this cycle of sty-, styles, styles seems to suggest that at the time that the second style was at its most most popular was just when those who owned these houses wanted to move onto something new. Understandably. Once everybody had it, it was time to think about, something else. And so the cycle just as these walls that we've been de-, describing, the Room with the Masks, the Fannius Sinistor, and this one in the Oplontis that we see on the left hand side of the screen. Just as they gained their greatest popularity, there was a decision to move on. To still another cycle of taste. And again, that's exactly what we're going to see at Oplontis.
