Style and Variety in the Art of the Roman Domestic Sphere

Abstract

My dissertation has several aims: first, to address the use and validity of August Mau’s Four-Style system as a methodological tool for analyzing Campanian wall painting and the domestic space it adorns; second, to shine light on the processes of maintenance and repair, and also redecoration, in early imperial Campanian villas, in order to reframe earlier painting through this later lens; and third, to provide a more nuanced interpretation of Roman domestic decorations of the first-century CE, one that possibly arrives at a better understanding of the category of painting referred to as the “Fourth Style” and its variegated aesthetic. In order to do this, I investigate how Romans themselves wrote and thought about style, a concept that was profoundly theorized in Graeco-Roman culture because of its value to rhetoric. Indeed, rhetorical training gave one the tools to communicate appropriately, whether in speech or writing, publicly or privately, and so in the Roman setting it became an essential part of education for men of a range of social backgrounds. By the first century BCE, there was demand for handbooks that explained this ancient technology, and the ones that have survived antiquity offer intriguing glimpses of not only how ancient people regarded rhetoric, but also painting and sculpture, which seem to have been perceived as parallel arts. Such texts reveal a mentality quite different from how we approach ancient art in the present. The villa was not a museum: decorations were meant to serve particular functions there, especially in ways that reflected well on their owners. Today we might describe an object by its dating, its artist, workshop, or school, its specific medium (to scientific precision), and its provenance. In the Roman domestic sphere, even in opulent maritime villas, this kind of information seems not to have been as prioritized; more important was whether the art was appropriate for display in its particular setting (e.g., library, garden, etc.) and whether it appropriately reflected the cultural values, education, or social aspirations of its owner. With this understanding of the value of decoration in domestic display, I propose a new interpretive model for assessing wall painting, one that prioritizes its visual function and not its dating. I also explore how style was supposed to be used in the Roman context: with varietas, or variety, which in the rhetorical texts is a stylistic value that relates to the use of many different styles in a single composition. I show how even among non-rhetoricians, particularly Pliny the Younger, varietas was an important aesthetic of oratory and writing, and it also had meaning beyond rhetoric: as a significant aesthetic concept in Roman art and villa culture, signaling qualities related to abundance, security, and wealth of resources. I argue this is an overlooked but significant concept when we assess the visual experience of Roman domestic decoration, especially wall painting. My final body chapter presents Villa A at Oplontis as a major case study, all the more useful because of the Villa’s intense recent analyses by the Oplontis Project. Reinterpreting “style” as functional, rather than temporal, allows us to focus on strategies of display in the mid-first century CE, and perhaps helps us better understand the functioning of the category of wall painting referred to as the “Fourth Style” in a Campanian maritime villa.