| Paintings and mosaics in Pompeii and Ercolano: |
Garden paintings
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While in the Greek world it was a place adorned with public
buildings, and in the Hellenistic one it was a site for princely
buildings, in the years between the end of the Roman Republic
and the early decades of the Empire the garden came to be, for
Rome, the prized ornament of rich private residences. The hortus
where vegetables and useful plants were grown became the
viridarium with ornamental plants, and gradually, during the
course of time, acquired sculpted accessories and fountains. At
the same time, the walls at the bottom of these inner spaces
themselves began to be decorated with pictures of opulent
gardens, with trees, bushes and flowering plants, inhabited by
birds and opening out onto ever-clear blue skies. These were not
completely natural spaces, even though the plants were arranged
without any planning and were not pruned as the ars topiaria had
already instructed. In the centre of the wall we could
invariably find a marble fountain of greater or lesser
simplicity gushing out water, while from among the leafy fronds
there emerged the tops of the stilopinakia, little marble
pictures on pillars, while on the transenna surrounding them
there would sit, or recline, figures of Silenes, Hermaphrodites
or Maenads, as if to emphasise the transition from the real to
the painted reality. The custom of painting gardens was not,
however, limited to the walls of real gardens; in order to
increase the illusion of size, the walls of triclinia and
cubicles opened onto pergolas, glades and bushes placed behind
transennas and trellises which were not usually articulated in a
straight line, but with gentle or semicircular recesses.
And it is above all with the Third Style that this type of
painting becomes widespread, and it is to this period that we
owe the finest example of garden paintings, most of which are
typified by the absence of perspective and consequent paratactic
arrangement of their component features, by a tendency towards
symmetry combined with a sort of horror vacui, and by the
absence of the human element: from the famous one in Villa di
Livia at Prima Porta to those yielded in Pompeii, especially
those, possible done by the same artist, which have come to
light in the last fifty years in the House of Floral Cubicles I
9, 2 and in the House of the Golden Bracelet VI Ins. Occ. 42. In
the cubicle in the former (12) of these two houses, the garden
is recreated on the black walls and is painted right up as far
as the ceiling where there is a flowering pergola from which,
among bunches of roses and grapes, can be seen objects of
Dionysian origins such as tambourines, drinking horns, cymbals,
cists and masks, until in the central picture we come upon
Dionysus himself on a panther.
An allusion to the world of this divinity is ever-present, both
directly by means of pictures of statues of semi-gods such as
Satyrs, Fauns, Maenads and Nymphs seen, not as being unchained
partakers of Dionysian vitality but rather as creatures
intrinsically at one with the great canvas of life inspired by
that magnanimous god, in a natural world that is neither violent
nor wild, and indirectly by means of a particular bird or plant.
Meticulous care is taken over the species that is represented in
light of the differences in meaning that were available to the
viewer, depending on whether among the plants it was possible to
detect roses, laurels, oleanders and strawberry trees, or rather
palm trees, fig trees or pear trees in fruit, and whether among
the birds there appeared alongside the doves, golden orioles,
blackbirds and sparrows, birds from the eastern and Egyptian
worlds such as magpies, swallows, peacocks and the sultana birds.
In the years of the Fourth Style, a variation appeared in this
type of painting; from the Claudian and Neronian years onwards,
reproductions of large exotic landscapes featured wild beasts
chasing each other, the so-called paradeisoi following the
example of the hunting reserves of the Persian monarchs. Thus it
became possible to find lions or panthers hunting down antelopes,
elephants, onagers, pythons and hyenas representing nature as
untamed by human hand, and in some cases these were juxtaposed
with representations of neatly-enclosed gardens.
In the portrayal of gardens in antiquity, there is always
reference to something exotic, far from daily routine and in
this we can perceive the search for an ideal world. This is
probably the result of the incessant attraction that the artist
felt for the Elysian Fields, to the next world which was seen as
a garden and as such was shown in tombs from the 4th and 3rd
centuries B.C. in Etruscan and Italic areas of influence, or in
that of the doctor Patron carried out in Rome between the end of
the 1st century B.C. and the beginning of the 1st A.D. in which
we may find the following epigram: "Neither brambles nor other
type of thorny plant can be found near my tomb, and neither
shall any form of nightbird shriek near it, but rather all sorts
of pleasing tree and plant grow around my burial-place, their
branches laden with magnificent fruit. And above there soars the
skylark of the gorgeous melody and the cricket's sweet song, and
the swallow with its clever warbling..............."
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Fonte: MANN
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