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7.2 Transition from Second to Third Style at Oplontis
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Roman Architecture
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Gilding the Lily: Painting Palaces and Villas in the First Century A.D.
Third Style Roman wall painting in villas belonging to elite patrons. Third Style painting is characterized by departure from perspectival vistas and return to a flat wall decorated with panel pictures and attenuated architectural elements. The Fourth Style is a compendium of all previous styles. Both coexist in Nero’s Domus Aurea.
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Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
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, it 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 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, or 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 might have
seen inside on of these Roman houses surrounding a garden.
Just as at Boscoreale, we see the, the the
gateway that seems to separate us from what lies beyond.
And we see again, the structure's surrounded by blue sky.
We also see these very substantial columns that are characteristic.
Of the second style, projecting out into the spectator space.
Supporting entablatures that also project out into the spectators
space, and supporting also a lintel that has a a ceiling.
With coffers that recede into depths. So, what we see in second style in
Oplontis is very similar to what we saw at second style at Boscoreale and
also at Pompeii Cubiculum 16, of the Villa of the Mysteries.
But if we at Caldarium 8, room 8 at the Caldarium
of the bath, we see something that may, may look superficially
similar but is actually very, very different and I think you
could pick out those differences very quickly just as I can.
What we're looking at here is
a view of three walls.
The most important back wall here and then the walls to the right and to the left.
And if you look carefully you'll see that the coloration is similar.
The famous Pompeii in red, a nice maroon,
some black, some gold, used here, and again,
quick glance, you see that there's a landscape
of some sort with a blue sky right in
the center, so you're being used to second style painting, you might
say to yourself, oh, well, that's another window into something that lies beyond.
But if we look at it very carefully, we will see that that is not the case at all.
We're going to see here that what has happened is that the artists have rejected
the perspectival panoramas of the second style, in favor of going back to a
appreciation of the flatness of a wall.
What is a wall but flat, a wall is flat, a flat wall is to be decorated, so.
It sort of, believing in that integrity, of that wall, is the
cornerstone of the thinking, for what we third style Roman wall painting.
And you can see the way the artist has treated the wall.
A series of zones.
A painted maroon
zone or a socle down here, a middle tier, painted Pompeian red, and upper tier
painted this gold, all of which looks like a series of stripes across the wall.
Let me show you another view which is a
little bit brighter, so that I think you can see
this better, the maroon zone, the red zone and
the gold zone and if you look also at the
the painting in the center you will
see that there are some architectural elements but
they are not the substantial architectural elements
of the second style They are very attenuated.
If you look at these, and we'll, I'll show you a detail in a moment.
It does, they are in fact columns, we'll see, with capitals at the top.
But from a distance, they don't look like they have, they don't look like columns.
They look like white stripes
against a flat wall. They support lintels as you can see here.
These lintels don't project.
They're just straight lintels. They're not broken in any way.
And they too are very delicate and from
a distance look like a stripe against the wall.
Not like a lintel.
We can also see and I think that by having a detail would help you here.
Yeah let me, let me first show you a comparison between this
wall in Caldarium 8 and the second star wall that we looked at just before.
And I think you can see very clearly.
The differences here.
Substantial columns in this case, the opening up of
the wall as a window to something that lies beyond.
This is very different.
Yes, there's a blue sky, yes there's a
tree, but that scene is contained within a frame.
I think I can also illustrate that better here by showing
you a detail of that central panel.
That central panel, by the way Represents not
something that one would be likely to see
outside the window of one's house but rather
a mythological scene which represents the legendary hero Hercules.
See him over here.
Hercules, and in fact Hercules has just finished the last of his twelve labors.
And he has brought
back the apples of the Hesperides which you see sitting on a rock over here.
And so he is celebrating the last of the, of, of,
of these 12 labors for some reason he seems to be as
a kind of tree hugger, here he seems to be hugging
the tree, a tree that has a yellow ribbon tied around it.
We, we use today yellow, we tie yellow ribbons
around things For a variety of reasons as we know,
we don't know exactly why the Romans did that
but we see that frequently in Roman wall painting.
But here he is standing at the base of the tree, his labors completed.
And that tree again is surrounded by blue sky.
But I think you can see that it is not a window into something that lies beyond.
Because the scene is contained within this frame
and what the artist has done is outline
the frame with a very black, dark black outline.
Now whether this has anything to do with those old curtains that
we talked about in the second style, might be interesting to speculate.
But it looks to us like it's basically just a
frame that is making it clear that this is flat.
But what we are dealing here with, what we are dealing with
here is a flat wall onto which a panel picture has been attached.
It is hung.
It seems to be hung on that flat wall.
It is not meant as a, as a window or a panorama into something else.
Besides the black frame you see there's also a molded frame.
Very nicely painted here.
And in this detail you can see that again what look like
stripes, white stripes on the flat wall, from a distance, are indeed columns.
You can see that they support capitals and a lintel up above.
But from a distance again they don't look that way.
And they are capitals that are, they
are columns and capitals very different from what
we've seen before because again they are
very, very, very, attenuated, very def-, very delicate.
They don't have any of the substance of the columns of the second-style.
Look up above the panel picture of Hercules, and you'll see,
and I have a better detail of this in a moment.
A series
of figures that are located in the yellow zone,
and I can show them better to you perhaps here.
Where you're looking also at a view of the socle.
This side of the wall you may have noticed
this in the general view, is actually a niche.
Is actually a niche a rectangular fairly shallow rectangular niche there
so the painting continues into that niche which gives it a little
sense of depth a little more sense of depth then it would have otherwise.
And above above the niche is a soffit, which you can see is
also painted and I show you a detail of that soffit up above.
If you look at what's right above the pict-, the
painting of Hercules, you will see, and I'll show you
these in detail in a moment, a citharist, that is,
a man who plays a cithara, who is seated there and
is playing his instrument.
On either side of him we see panel pictures.
And then on top of those panel pictures, peacocks.
Peacocks that are represented frontally and look out toward us.
And if you look at both, and we'll look
at them in detail again momentarily, if you look
at the citharist and if you look at the
peacocks, you see that they are standing on ground lines.
The ground lines that don't look like they have any depth in fact they're standing
somewhere where you couldn't really stand which
is one of the interesting features of
3rd style, again, this desire to move and to respect the flatness of the wall.
If we look at the soffit we see that that to is painted
in red and gold that it is divided into a series of panels.
That in those panels we see floating mythological figures.
A woman on a bull, I'll show you a detail of her in
a moment, just floating in the center.
Which doesn't seem to be in any space at all, she's just floating there.
And then on either side, a niche with a shell at the top with standing figures and
then strangely enough pictures of still life paintings right below those.
Here's, here are all those details.
Here we see the citharist sitting again with there
doesn't seem to be, there is a, a brown,
a, a maroon, a brown line here but it doesn't look like it occupies any space.
So there's this interesting tension between the
flatness of the wall and the fact
that seems to be a figure sitting somewhere where there is no place to sit.
The same with the peacocks.
You can see them, this one standing on this white flat line, his toes
do seem to be, you know, projecting a bit over though, so this is interesting
tension between whats flat, and what might be, might have a
hint of space and then below that, one of this sacro-idyllic
landscapes again framed in black, making it clear that we are
to read this as a panel picture hanging on a flat wall.
A kind of picture gallery in a way that's very different from second style.
Up here a mysterious figure
with a sacrificial dish standing in
a niche, with a shell decoration at the top.
And then still-live of painting with fruit down below, and then up here,
something that we're going to see becomes
ubiquitous in third style Roman wall painting.
A figure that floats in the center of a colored panel, in red, or black, or white.
In this case, a, a mostly
nude female figure, who is riding, as you can see, on the back of a bull.
At least the front of the, of the animal is
a bull, and you can see the back of the animal
has a, has a fish tail so it's a kind
of a bull like sea creature, as you can see here.
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