Members' Research Report Archive
Nobilibus Pinacothecae Sunt Faciundae: The Inception of the Roman Fictive Picture Gallery
Nathaniel B. Jones [Yale University]
David E. Finley Fellow, 2010–2013
In the middle of the first century BCE, Roman muralists began to place representations of independent works of art within their compositions. By the Augustan period and the decoration of the suburban estate known as the Villa
The painted wall, in this room and others in the city of Rome and throughout Campania, became a staging point for the fictive picture art collection, dominated by the representation of panel painting. In such compositions, one level of mimetic rhetoric—the immersive illusion that the viewer stands inside a well-appointed, highly articulated large architectural space, rather than a small, painted room—is interrupted by
Traditional accounts of Roman wall painting have largely focused on questions of chronology, style, or iconography, although recent decades have seen increased interest in its social significance and its semiotic and literary qualities. My dissertation, conversely, centers on questions of format and modes of display. It seeks to understand how, in the course of the second half of the first century BCE, Roman wall painting was transformed from an art primarily engaged in the exploration of pictorial space into one primarily interested in the depiction of other kinds of art. On the one hand, the project investigates the compositional principles of paintings in the fictive picture gallery style and seeks to understand the pictorial logic that sustains them. On the other, it attempts to situate the murals within the larger context of artistic production, consumption, and display in Rome during the late republic and early empire. I examine paintings in the early fictive picture gallery style from the points of view of contemporary Roman attitudes to art, including religious, political, ethical, aesthetic, and historical discourses.
I also employ the paintings, in turn, as a lens through which other Roman cultural practices may be reevaluated. By incorporating the imitation of panel painting into the mural tradition of the first century BCE, the artists and patrons of these paintings folded a style of painting traditionally coded as Greek into one traditionally coded as Roman. This act of embedding, the dissertation seeks to demonstrate,
Equally important to the study are the complex connections between
Center 33 (includes image not shown here)