| Paintings and mosaics in Pompeii and Ercolano: |
Campanian funerary painting
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While painting as an art form
employed for the expression and analysis of the potential of the
passions certainly goes back to Greek times, so much so that
Simonides defined it as "muted poetry", it is equally certain
that the idea of decorating the interiors of tombs was not Greek.
It was especially the areas on the edge of the Greek world that
at different periods and with varying degrees of success made
this custom their own. In particular, it was those societies
that had taken up the Greek cultural model and had adopted
strictly hierarchical organisations that saw the execution of
decorations that were never to be seen, with the exception of
the moment of burial itself or in the event of the re-opening of
the burial-place for further depositions. Suffice it to mention
the copious production of Etruscan painting, well-documented in
the necropolises at Tarquinia, Vulci and Orvieto, or of that by
the Lucanians as attested by rural finds, in order to appreciate
the important role played by funerary painting in the Italic
peninsula from the 6th century B.C onwards.
It should come as no great surprise therefore that in Capua, the
capital of the Etruscan dodecapolis in Campania and what was the
"largest and wealthiest city in [ancient] Italy", more than
forty-five decorated tombs have been discovered since the 19th
century, half of which, kept in the Museo Provinciale Campano in
Capua, were destroyed in the course of a World War II
bombardment. Research over the last thirty years alone has seen
the discovery of twenty-two tombs five of which consist of a
chamber with purely decorative ornamentation or with curtaining
but without the subject which are represented in the cavity
graves discovered between 1970 and 1972 on the eastern outskirts
of ancient Capua (modern S. Maria Capua Vetere). In this case
the burials, and therefore also the paintings, can be traced
back to between the middle of the 4th century B.C. and the start
of the 3rd century B.C. in a period that was not only quite
removed from Etruscan hegemony but actually dominated by the
Samnites who, despite having eliminated several traces of
Etruscan culture, were not themselves averse to self-expression
of their own, albeit in realistic fashion, through painting.
It is the solid nature of the backing onto which the single
subjects or scenes were painted that has helped the long-term
conservation of this art form, which was also employed on
occasions other than funerary ceremonies, although in these
latter cases the backing was of a more precarious nature, such
as wood, thereby leading to its consequent disintegration, and
loss of the painting. While ancient authors, above all Pliny and
Vitruvius, speak of the slow and painstaking nature of a
painting carried out on wood or as a fresco, tomb paintings were
often carried out at the last moment, as can be seen by the
marks on the still-fresh plaster left by ropes which were used
to put together the slabs of tufa.
A very fine layer of mortar was applied, often quite unable to
cover all the bumps and grooves in the stone, and it was onto
this that rapid line drawings of the subjects were sketched, to
be followed by the application of background colours. These were
often selected from a very narrow range, including mainly brown,
red and white with the addition of yellow and blue. Colours were
generally lacking in tonal variations and only in exceptional
cases were they enriched with shading.
In effect, Campanian painting stands out for simplicity of
design, although allowance must be made for the scarcity of
examples to take into consideration. General tendency was to
paint one stone only, depicting the deceased male being
accompanied by a servant or companion, and welcomed in the next
life by a woman. In other cases, , and this refers to more
recent discoveries, the deceased male or female are portrayed
alone on the headstone, while only in two cases is there a
character on the opposite stone. There is no chance, then, of
finding any of the articulated "processions" that we have in the
tombs from Nola even though a deliberate attempt was made to "capture",
in accordance with pre-set and fairly rigid guidelines, the
ritual scene of the funeral ceremony by specifically portraying
the characters, thus enabling recognition of "the warrior", "the
horseman", "the servant", "the priest", "the woman"; this is
evident above all on those stones portraying only one figure.
Fate has determined that even those stones which survived
destruction during World War II, inasmuch as they were kept in
the Naples Museum, were of the single-figure type: one of these
shows a horseman with a two-horned helmet while another shows a
magistrate and another depicts a woman looking at her own
reflection. These are all rather similar to the tombs discovered
at S. Prisco near S. Maria Capua Vetere, featuring horsemen, a
lightly-armed foot-soldier, a hoplite in heavy armour and
assorted women. While it is perfectly at one with the social and
cultural picture that we have been able to put together of
Samnite Capua, the presence of the horseman confirms the fame
enjoyed in the courts of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. by the
Campanian equites who were supplied by the local
aristocracy, and the figure of the foot-soldier reveals the
presence of a body of Hoplites which must have been provided by
the self-same aristocracy. The figure of the so-called
magistrate, which has been identified by his ring and..........
............. only finds a parallel as far its "non-warrior"
status is concerned in the figure of the so-called priest in the
chamber-burial place discovered in 1853, the decorations of
which were the subject of a water-painting.
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Fonte: MANN
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