Master Narratives and the Wall Painting of the House of the Vettii, Pompeii
2012; Wiley; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1468-0424.2012.01697.x
ISSN1468-0424
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoFrom the god in the doorway who pulls aside his clothing to weigh his exposed penis against a bag of money on a set of scales, to the reception room scene of a stripped king being torn apart by his crazed female relatives (Figure 7), the paintings in the House of the Vettii have titillated tourists and intrigued scholars since they were first uncovered in Pompeii in the 1890s. What questions about ancient Italian society can we productively bring to bear on these images, and how should we formulate them? Two studies from the 1990s point to some intriguing avenues of approach to these old walls. David Fredrick and Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow use feminist film theory, particularly Laura Mulvey's pioneering work on the male gaze in twentieth-century cinema, to reveal some of the work done by mythological paintings in Pompeii in encoding social hierarchies.1 In her 1975 formulation, Mulvey theorises how the patriarchal conditions of early Hollywood produced a cinematic language which was male. In particular, she applies psychoanalytic theory to film and the way it ‘structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking’ by highlighting two features of the gaze which please the male viewer by protecting him from symbolic ‘castration’, a loss of power or privilege.2 One of these features is embedded in the way images are presented visually: parts of the female body are focalised, exaggerated or beautified, which distracts the viewer from that body's lack of a penis and the implied threat to the male viewer's own. The second means is via narrative; Mulvey argues ‘the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification’ and so enjoys the active role of moving the story along.3 The arc of many of these male-driven stories also ultimately condemns those who are female, providing entertainment through either their punishment or forgiveness for their lack of a penis.4 Although Mulvey specifically addresses film, particularly ‘illusionistic narrative film’ from mainstream Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, scholars have applied her perspective to numerous other forms of imagery to understand how they encode patriarchy.5 Using film theory to understand mythological panels is particularly compelling because these still paintings allude to well-known stories. This type of art, thus, both focuses the viewer's eye and presents a full story arc, much like film, particularly the way Mulvey approaches film. Moreover, as Katharina Lorenz has recently emphasised, images in houses tend to be juxtaposed within rooms in unique ways – that is, although the same scene from a myth might be repeated within a house or across different houses, only rarely do different rooms or houses combine a similar set of mythological scenes.6 In the way its paintings compositionally and thematically correspond and contrast, each room and each house thus tells its own story using both image and narrative. Finally, ancient Pompeii was a male-dominated society, and it is well worth considering how the paintings in houses inscribed local power structures and pleased patrons. Fredrick and Koloski-Ostrow, the classical scholars who bring Mulvey's cinematic perspectives to bear on ancient Italian painting, indeed bring forth important insights; however, both authors also come across imagery which contradicts Mulvey's patterns. As Fredrick observes, [T]he erotic object is not only female in wall painting: it can be anatomically female or male, or both – Narcissus, Endymion and Hermaphroditus are all popular. Moreover, a significant number of the victims of sexual violence in the paintings are male (e.g., Actaeon and Hylas); their symbolic castration is also on display. What might these passive or feminized male forms contribute to the grammar of erotic bodies on Pompeian walls?7 Koloski-Ostrow comes to a strikingly similar question in analysing the paintings of the Casa del Menandro and Casa degli Amorini dorati using the same theoretical framework to understand what she rightly sees as the ‘strongly erotic and violent content of this mythological repertoire’.8 After using an image of Actaeon to explore the workings of Mulvey's gaze, she observes that this male figure, physically torn apart by his own hunting dogs after catching sight of a bathing goddess, Diana, suffers the very ‘castration’ which Mulvey argues men fear and from which early- to mid-twentieth-century cinema provides pleasing avenues of escape.9 My goal is to work on these questions posed by Fredrick and Koloski-Ostrow, to pick up again this conversation across epistemologies and to interrogate both bodies of knowledge – studies of ancient wall painting and psychoanalytically-based feminist film analysis. How do Pompeian wall paintings contradict the patterns articulated by Mulvey? What are some ancient sources of these contradictions? How do the ‘camera angle’, the internal gazers and the narrative presented in paintings position and please the viewer? What are some modern sources of these contradictions, that is, how have subsequent film theorists responded to Mulvey and what do they bring to the question of how ‘passive or feminized male forms contribute to the grammar of erotic bodies on Pompeian walls?’10 My answers will proceed along two vectors. In one, I point to the vast cultural and epistemological gap between twentieth-century Euro-American psychoanalytic theory and ancient Italian concepts and experiences of gender and sexuality. Mulvey, drawing upon Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, gives primary, perhaps even exclusive weight to the differences between male and female bodies. I will argue that it is productive to contrast this focus on gender with ancient Italian practices of slavery, in which what we conceive of as gender, if used in isolation, might have done a poor job of articulating relationships of power. A case study of the decoration of a house in Pompeii potentially owned by a former slave helps explore this contrast. In two paired receiving rooms of the House of the Vettii, the formal compositions of the paintings deliberately call our attention to possible comparisons and contrasts. The imagery resonates with Roman slave practices; paired scenes of corporal punishment and sexualised violence negate the difference between male and female and focus on other means of articulating status hierarchies, particularly the dominion of gods over mortals. In several paintings the Vettii and the artists they commissioned combine stories from Greek mythology in unique ways to assert the status of the owners as masters. In this ancient Italian home – and I suggest in many others – a master gaze significantly inflects the male one.11 Although this first vector reclassifies some imagery in the context of ancient slavery as not gender inversion or instability, but as a pleasurable visual mastery over both male and female bodies, other paintings in the house do encourage the viewer's identification with, rather than avoidance of, suffering. For example, these same rooms juxtapose a painting of a visually objectified princess, Ariadne, who later wins immortality, with an image of the male hero Hercules, who also became a god, shown as a child being attacked by snakes. The scenes again equate a male and female body, but now they are the protagonists, divinised at the end of the ‘film’, so they also encourage the viewer to identify with the suffering Ariadne and Hercules. In Mulvey's terms, the viewer bears the burden of sexual objectification in these images, and ‘castration’ is not avoided. How should we understand the appeal of these images? What can they tell us about Pompeian society? Scholarly reaction to Mulvey's work in the field of film studies proves useful, particularly Carol Clover's 1992 analysis of a different violent art, American and British horror films of the 1970s and 1980s.12 In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Clover explores multiple examples of cross-gender viewer identification and the pleasures of pain. Clover also sees this phenomenon as able to be explained only partially via psychoanalytic theory because of a cultural distance: ‘many horror scenarios have a pre-Freudian and premodern cast’.13 In considering the popularity of violent, gender-bending films, however, Clover also draws attention to Mulvey's blind spot on masochism, the pleasures viewers feel when they are scared or sympathise with characters in pain. Fredrick also points to the potential in analysing how some ancient paintings explore alternative, subordinate subject positions via mythological or fictional characters, although his explanations for this move tend to focus on the anxieties of elite Roman males.14 Given the broad popularity of such images in Pompeian homes, and their prominence in the case study house (which certainly was not owned by a member of the elite from the capital), I will deploy some of Clover's conceptions of the ‘masochistic aesthetic’ to explore ‘that particular audience's stake in that particular nightmare’.15 Again the crux of my answer will come from cultural particularities of ancient Italy, in which all boys were potential objects of the erotic gaze and thus experienced a period of objectification and subordination. In such a society, cross-gender identification and Freud's ‘female masochism’ are surprisingly promising notions to consider. In this paper, I will first present an overview of the House of the Vettii and its likely owners. Next I will explore in more depth how modern scholars have engaged with ancient Italian painting in studying social history, and in particular how gender has been used as a focal point in this analysis. Finally, we will walk through the House of the Vettii, analysing its surviving paintings using both techniques from film theory and information on ancient Italian culture, from slavery to sexual categories. My main goal is to demonstrate that in reading imagery from ancient Italy, gender cannot be viewed productively when separated from a master/slave dichotomy and from ancient Italian conceptions of sexuality, an argument made easier to perceive by looking for where a theory imported from another place and time slips in its explanatory power. Pompeii – a small to medium-sized town on the south-west coast of Italy – was famously buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. The House of the Vettii is located in what is now known as Region VI, a neighbourhood in the north-west corner of the walled part of town and to the north and east of the forum area (Figure 1). Map of walled part of Pompeii (adapted from Alison E. Cooley and M. G. L. Cooley, Pompeii: A Sourcebook[London: Routledge, 2004], Figure 1.1, p. 6). This region has a concentration of large-sized homes leading into the forum, but otherwise contains what Andrew Wallace-Hadrill identifies as a characteristic mix of small to large houses and shops.16 Block 15 is on the northeastern end of the region, near the Vesuvian Gate; the House of the Vettii occupies the entire southern end of the block. The main entrance (into room a on Figure 2) is from the Vicolo dei Vettii into the main reception room or atrium, but a side service entrance from the Vicolo di Mercurio also exists (into room 2). The size of the ground floor of the house is approximately 1100m2, placing it among the large houses in Pompeii.17 Floor plan of the House of the Vettii (VI 15, 1), Pompeii, (heavily adapted from August Mau, Pompeji in Leben und Kunst [Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1900], p. 311, Figure 159). The house was discovered during excavations in the years 1894–95 and was carefully documented in publications by August Mau and later Antonio Sogliano.18 As a result, we know the arrangement of marble furniture in the garden, locations of pottery finds and the like. In addition, within a few years of excavation the roofing of much of the house was reconstructed, which contributed to the remarkable preservation of the in situ painted decoration, although the house has recently fallen into disrepair and has been closed to visitors. Scholars such as Willem Peters, Arnold de Vos and Mariette de Vos concur that the house was extensively renovated between the earthquake of 62 CE and the destruction of the town by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.19 I shall be focusing upon this last ancient phase of the home's history. Figure 2 shows the general layout in plan. On the whole, the House of the Vettii is a large but not unusual atrium-style Italian house. Looking through the main doorway into a, the visitor would enjoy a framed and symmetrical sight-line through the entryway, atrium or front hallway (c) and colonnaded rear garden (m), even though the house itself is not symmetrical. For the most part, individual rooms open onto the front hall or rear garden, which were open to the sky and thus provided air and light to all rooms of the house. An astonishing number of the rooms opening onto these are richly decorated with wall paintings generally agreed to have been carried out by a single workshop as part of the renovations following the earthquake of 62 CE.20 Many large houses in Pompeii offered rooms decorated with expensive panels of mythological scenes; the House of the Vettii has six.21 The large garden was also richly ornamented with bronze and marble sculpture and fountains – as much luxurious display was packed into the space as possible.22 Two small service areas are also evident (v–y and 1–4, shaded in Figure 2). The first consists of a set of rooms around a small central atrium (v) with stairs to the lost second floor and a small central pool to capture rainwater from a presumed opening in the roof. This section's plain decor, inclusion of a kitchen (w) and architectural segregation from the rest of the house suggest this area was reserved for the labour of the servants of the household and was not meant to be visited by the public or invited guests. The second service area is also utilitarian. Although this section could be entered through a long, narrow corridor (room 3) from the main atrium of the house, it was also accessible from the street through the doorway into room 2. This entrance was a gate large enough to allow the passage of draft animals, which were stabled in room 4. To the left of this entrance was a latrine (room 1). In the corridor to the atrium, remains are visible of a stairway to the second floor, but again none of the upper part of the house survives. Evidence suggests the house may have been owned by former slaves, or freedmen. Scholars from de Vos and de Vos to John Clarke generally agree that Aulus Vettius Conviva and Aulus Vettius Restitutus were owners of the aptly named House of the Vettii.23 These names appear on two bronze seals found inside the front hall close to the remains of a large chest on the south wall; ‘A. Vetti Restituti’, or ‘of Aulus Vettius Restitutus’ and the image of an amphora were engraved into one, ‘A. Vetti Convivaes [sic]’, or ‘of Aulus Vettius Conviva’ and a caduceus were carved into the other.24 A ring was also found with the initials AVC.25 Although Henrik Mouritsen casts reasonable doubt on the reliability of seal stamps in identifying the owner(s) of Pompeian homes, even he agrees that the ring and seals help confirm the identification of Conviva and Restitutus as owners in this particular instance.26 In addition, in a slogan painted onto the outer east wall of the house, Restitutus asks voters to support a certain Sabinus in his run for political office.27 Such programmata are well-known in Pompeii. Although scholars disagree on whether or not the supporter named in them must be the owner or intimate associate of the owner of the house whose facade is so painted, the seals, ring and programmata in this instance work together to show that Conviva and Restitutus were likely residents of the house and socially prominent.28 Similar evidence points to the status of these men as freed. First, Vettius Conviva seems to be identified in another graffito on the southern facade of the house as an Augustalis, a type of priest.29 Fragments of a seal ring may also have had the abbreviation Aug following his name.30 Scholars such as Steven Ostrow and Andrik Abramenko have shown that this local priesthood was largely held by former slaves, and that this office would indicate Conviva possessed some wealth and standing in the community, since candidates for the sacred college donated costly gifts of public benefaction and were chosen by the town council.31‘Restitutus’ was commonly, if not exclusively, a slave name.32 When he was freed, the praenomen (first name) and nomen (family name) of his former master would have been added, and thus A. Vettius Restitutus was in all likelihood also a freedman. A. Vettius Conviva appears as a witness in a famous preserved set of business tablets owned by one Q. Caecilius Iucundus.33 The tablets were buried in the earthquake of 62 CE; by this time, Conviva was a free man, since he is identified in them with the praenomen, nomen and cognomen characteristic of free males. Altogether the evidence is convincing that he was a freedman and an owner of this large house during its final phase. But who was A. Vettius Restitutus, and what was his relationship to Conviva? Scholars traditionally call the men ‘brothers’, which is possible but far from provable.34 Their shared praenomen and nomen indicate that they may have been owned by the same person and subsequently freed – any familial relationship they would have had is obscured by their freedman nomenclature, which privileges their relationship to their former master.35 They may have been brothers, or they may have been fellow slaves (colliberti), who, as Sandra Joshel has demonstrated, often formed economic and social partnerships,36 or they may have been father and son.37 Another alternative is that Restitutus was Conviva's ex-slave – his name would be the same whether he was freed by Conviva himself or by Conviva's former master. Given Conviva's more established status, I might suggest that he was an owner of the house, and that Restitutus was an important member of his household – a son, brother or freedman – to whom the property perhaps passed upon Conviva's death. Two branches of the gens Vettia are known in Pompeii; both families produced several candidates for local offices in the early empire and thus could have had former slaves of the wealth and status of the owners of the House of the Vettii.38 What are the implications if this house was owned by former slaves? First, we will need to think about ancient Italian notions of slavery and the dynamics through which some slaves became free. Then I shall review how earlier scholars have seen freedmen in the decoration of the House of the Vettii. Finally, I articulate how I will interpret the imagery with their status in mind. Keith Bradley and Richard Saller, among others, have explored extensively what the jurist Gaius referred to as the ‘primary distinction in the law of persons’, demonstrating how slave was distinguished from free in terms of law, labour, discipline, religion and sexuality.39 Slave-owning Romans considered their slaves to be part of their familia. A legal family unit was defined as the eldest free male (paterfamilias) and those subject to his authority, including his free and legitimate children, his slaves and potentially his wife.40 Within a large urban household, slaves had specialised jobs organised into a social hierarchy. Work performed for the free members of the family would have included food storage, preparation and service, textile production and cleaning, house maintenance and childcare; depending upon the house, services might also entail work for the family shop or business, secretarial and accounting tasks, management, work as an artisan, valet or dresser, messenger, entertainer, tutor, guard and the like.41 Legally, slaves were considered a particular type of property, and they were not allowed to own capital of their own. Even so, many owners allowed their slaves to keep a small private fund, from which some slaves eventually bought their freedom. Slaves had even less control over their human offspring than the products of their labour. The children of a slave woman had the same status as their mother; they were the property of her owner, liable to be exposed at birth or sold, lent, given or willed out of the household at his or her whim. Although slaves sometimes took spouses, these bonds created no legal ties between the couple or between slave fathers and children. In fact, all the slave's familial relationships outside of that to the owner went formally unacknowledged in the broader community.42 Finally, as will be discussed in greater detail below, slaves had no control over their own bodies. The elite, male authors of our surviving literature assume that male and female slaves were available to their masters for sexual use, and they consider corporal punishment appropriate for slaves, but not for freeborn members of a household. The transition out of slavery into freedom was predictably complex. Among slaves with specialised and marketable skills, manumission was not uncommon; slaves either saved the money to purchase themselves or were freed by their owner in a will or for varied purposes during the owner's lifetime.43 Within the Roman legal system, someone freed by a citizen became a citizen.44 Freedmen were thereby able to marry and produce legitimate children, make contracts and wills, vote, take legal action and own property. As has been recently and carefully documented by Mouritsen, two factors continued to shape the lives of a freedman or freedwoman throughout their lives, however: stigmas attached to having been a slave and continuing obligations to one's former owner.45 Patrons retained a claim on their former slave's labour, estate, public obedience and sexual services. Formal restrictions on the activities of freedmen seem to stem from their onetime lack of bodily integrity: ex-slaves were forbidden from joining the Roman military and holding most political and religious offices. An important exception was two cults created by the first emperor Augustus, including the priesthood of the Augustales which we have noted A. Vettius Conviva held. Many freedmen also invested energies in the success of their legitimate children, since once adults they would have the opportunities of the freeborn open to them.46 Previous scholars have approached the House of the Vettii and other art commissioned by freedmen with the status of ex-slaves in mind. Lauren Hackworth Petersen has argued well, however, that they tend to draw heavily on impressions of the concerns and predicaments of wealthy freedmen gleaned from the way they are mocked for comic effect by elite writers such as Juvenal, Martial and Petronius.47 For example, Petronius composed a fictional banquet given by an ex-slave Trimalchio in which he depicts the host as overly material and crass, lacking sophistication and education in myth or history. The fictional freedman also makes critical social errors in the way he presents his own masculinity and sexual history, and he fails to distinguish himself from and control his slaves, among many other faults. Although some of these echo aspects of the transition from slavery to freedom which I have outlined, Petersen rightly emphasises the irresponsibility of using this stereotyped caricature as evidence for the concerns and interests of real people of a different class from the powerful elite author.48 We must remember that the freed were part of a subculture largely lost to us but in which, as Joshel and Petersen have shown, labour was a source of pride and identity, rather than shame, as it was among the elite.49 In characterising the House of the Vettii, some scholars have succumbed to this tendency to draw on literary caricatures of freedmen, a tendency Petersen calls ‘Trimalchio vision’.50 Petronius presents his character as wildly overcompensating in behaviour and material display for the education and refinement which he lacks.51 The decoration of the House of the Vettii has similarly been called ‘overburdened’ and ‘outlandish’.52 Special emphasis in this type of reading is placed on the painting of Priapus in the doorway, weighing his mighty member on a set of scales, an image echoed in a marble statue of Priapus found elsewhere in the house.53 Clarke emphasises that this god was associated with fertility and averting the evil eye through laughter, but it is difficult not to see these aggressively male images as overcompensation.54 Economic historian Michael Rostovtzeff also reads the famous painted frieze, in room q, of miniature Cupids and Psyches busy at a wide range of labours as biographical information about how the Vettii earned their wealth.55 A theoretical apparatus imported from outside the field of classics is one way to evade Trimalchio vision. Mulvey's work from 1975 provides tools for decoding an image's expression of power relations. These methods are both visual – in terms of costuming, body position, focalisation, the way characters view others inside the frame and how that encourages an external viewer to look – and narrative – in terms of who acts, who is acted upon and who is punished. This is the draw of Mulvey's approach, even though her ideas have been challenged on many fronts, including her own critique in subsequent work.56 In addition to such theoretical tools, another tack I intend to take is to consider persistently whether or not it matters if the owners of the house were freeborn or freed. A significant body of recent scholarship, including the work of Maud Gleason, Erik Gunderson, Anthony Corbeill and Amy Richlin, has analysed the literary production and artistic commissions of elite Roman men for the ways they define and defend their privileged status as men or attack the legitimacy of rivals based on questionable masculinity.57 Freedmen and other men had just as much, if not more motivation to assert their status as men and masters for themselves, for their peers, for their fellow citizens and for their own slaves and ex-slaves. In the end, the fact that this house may have been owned by former slaves only serves as a useful prompt to consider the question whether or not gender alone encodes social hierarchies in its mythological paintings. I hope to demonstrate that considering the stories told by the images of this house from a freed rather than a freeborn male's point of view – or just from a master's rather than a male's point of view – reveals much, regardless of the owner's actual status. As we have seen, Pompeian households had a slave/free dynamic as much as a male/female one, and behaviours, institutions, ideas and objects helped hold both hierarchies in place. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan note in the introduction to their 1998 book, Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture, that ‘material culture had a role in structuring the relations of men and women, masters and slaves, and functioned to uphold citizen discourses of gender and social status’.58 How material culture structured both social hierarchies at the same time, however, has been underexplored: ‘scholars of antiquity overlook gender when talking about status or overlook status when talking about gender’.59 Thinking about the transition from an objectified slave to an objectifying master can help us unsettle more broadly our notion of what it meant to be male in this slave-owning society and to consider its effects on the potential of psychoanalytic interpretation. Scholars such as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Eleanor Windsor Leach, Katharina Lorenz, John Clarke and Shelley Hales have studied broadly the work done by the wall painting of ancient Italian houses to create and project the identity of the owner, their role in the home and in the wider community.60 The mythological panel has provided particularly rich fodder for analysis. Wallace-Hadrill defines it as ‘a formally constructed scene, in a Hellenizing idiom, of a subject from Greek mythology’.61 Particularly prevalent in later styles of Pompeian wall painting, such scenes are usually set into privileged sections in the centre of a decorated wall, rather like a framed painting in a modern home, but here painted into a fresco which covers the entire wall (Figure 7).62 Daniela Corlàita Scagliarini, John Clarke and others have argued that such paintings tend to be absent from spaces through which people moved, where the decoration was not designed to encourage lingering study or promote conversation.63 As we have briefly seen, in terms of basic architectural structure, large Italian houses of the early imperial period consisted of two primary features, the main hall or atrium and a colonnaded garden, often but not always aligned on a central access and with smaller rooms opening off from each.64 In homes decorated with wall painting, mythological scenes tend to be presented in the reception rooms, including rooms designed for the dinner party. Such paintings are usually elaborate and engaging, calling for explanation and thus prompting conversation, as is evinced not just by the decoration of such rooms across Pompeii and beyond, but in some literary accounts analysing similar mythological art.65 The mythological panels of a home displayed the owner as Hellenised, cultured, wealthy and urbane; as we shall now investigate further, they have also been read as a complex discourse about relationships of power. 66 In a compelling example, Fredrick uses the work of Mulvey to analyse Pompeian paintings of the mythical figure, Ariadne.67 This princess helped the hero Theseus escape the labyrinth on Crete, only to be abandoned by him on a different island; she was later discovered there by her future husband, the god Dionysus. The three extremely common scenes of Ariadne's abandonment by Theseus while she sleeps, of her realisation of her abandonment
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