As you can see from today's lecture title,

we're going to be talking about painting palaces and villas in

the first century A.D.

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 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 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 in the

House of Augustus, on the Palatine Hill in Rome,

both examples of Second 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,

seemed 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 painting 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 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 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 that

although they revered the past, they were willing to look

forward to the future.

And we're going to see, especially in the late first

century A.D., into the second 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 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 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 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

belonged to a woman by the name of Poppaea--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 of a mean streak as he did,

in that she encouraged him, quite avidly,

to murder his mother, to murder 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 B.C.--

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, 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

looked like it had been empty at the time of the eruption of

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 reuse,

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 colonnades that are part

of peristyles, in some cases,

but also are colonnades that look out from the villa toward

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, 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 8,

over here, and that room is part of an interior bath,

an elaborate interior bath, that was part of this villa.

And Room Number 8, 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 as 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 and

doorways, but also these peristyle courts

and colonnaded courts and so on, that again give this a very

open appearance, which is part of again this

important development toward that kind of openness.

The villa has in it both Second and Third 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, 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 the transition from

the Second to the Third Style, the cycle of styles seems to

suggest that at the time that the Second Style was at its most

popular was just when those who owned these houses wanted to

move on to 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 describing-- the Room of the Masks,

the Fannius Sinistor, and this one in 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.

I show you here on the left--actually it's not on your

Monument List but in order to get us to the Third Style,

I want to say something about a Second Style painting at

Oplontis, and we see a detail of that on

the left-hand side of the screen.

I compare it to the Second Style, or a part of the Second

Style wall of P. Fannius Sinistor at Boscoreale.

And I think you can see the resemblance between the two.

The objectives are the same.

The artist is trying to open up the wall,

to create a picture window through which you can see a

vista -- a vista that includes a round

shrine, just as we saw here.

So the same at Oplontis, a round shrine,

in this case with the windows spread to see a cult statue

inside, and that shrine,

that circular shrine or tholos,

surrounded by a peristyle, the kind of peristyle that one