| Paintings and mosaics in Pompeii and Ercolano: |
Portrait of an old man
|
 This
medallion, with upper part damaged, shows the face of a man with
a long white beard, with a garland of ivy on his head. These
features identify him as the poet or philosopher "type" which
were already common in painting, mainly in the Second Style, in
the seated or full-length standing pose.
Other distinctive features of this character is the Greek-style
himation that he is wearing without a tunic underneath, and the
slightly twisted face that manages to endow the figure with
vitality. This face can be compared, as far as the fine
balancing of proportions is concerned, with that of the figure
of the standing "poet", housed in the library of house VI
Ins.occ., 41 in Pompeii which pre-dates this one by about eighty
years, and in particular on account of the rich garland of
leaves which fall onto his temples, but not his forehead, and
the way his cloak is wrapped around his neck.
It might be thought that the artist who did the medallion in the
House of the Cytharist, one of the largest and most sumptuous in
Pompeii as far as ornamentation and sculptural pieces are
concerned, had reworked a detail from an obsolete but not
forgotten model.
Bibliography: PPM I, p. 143 fig. 44 (referring to a basically
yellow room, though this medallion has clearly come away from a
red wall); V.M. Strocka, Pompeji VI 17, 41: ein Haus mit
Privatbibliothek, in RM 1993, pp. 321-351
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Fonte: MANN
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