Villa Boscoreale is an ancient Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

 villa located in the town of Boscoreale

Boscoreale

Boscoreale is a comune and town in the province of Naples, Campania, located in the Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio under the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, known for the fruit and vineyards of Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio...

, about one and a half kilometers north of Pompeii

Pompeii

The city of Pompeii is a partially buried Roman town-city near modern Naples in the Italian region of Campania, in the territory of the comune of Pompei. Along with Herculaneum, Pompeii was destroyed and completely buried during a long catastrophic eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius spanning...

, southwest of Vesuvius, in Campania

Campania

Campania is a region in southern Italy. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,590 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...

, southern Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. This area was a hunting reserve and also used agriculturally, specializing in wine and olive oil. Evidence in tablets and graffiti

Graffiti

Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....

 shows that the house was probably built in the 1st century (around 30-40) BC. The villa was largely destroyed and entirely buried burned by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius

Mount Vesuvius

Mount Vesuvius is a stratovolcano in the Gulf of Naples, Italy, about east of Naples and a short distance from the shore. It is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years, although it is not currently erupting...

 in AD 79. It was privately discovered, excavated, partially dismantled and reburied in 1900. Its auctioned images exist in a number of museums, internationally.

Ownership

Ownership of the villa has been contested. While there is no doubt P. Fannius Synistor did reside there, excavated bronze tablets show another name, that of Lucius Herrenius Florus . Many things were marked with seals in ancient Rome to indicate possession. It is believed that since the tablet with the letters "L. HER. FLO" on the front of it was found inside the villa, it must serve as a mark of villa ownership. These two owners are the only confirmed owners in the early 1st century BC and 1st century AD. However, there may have been a first owner before them even. For clarity, the house is referred to as being owned by P. Fannius Synistor.

Art

The Villa is most notable for its now auction-scattered artistic works, notably its highly skilled buon fresco

Buon fresco

Buon fresco is a fresco painting technique in which alkaline resistant pigments, ground in water, are applied to plaster when it is still wet, as opposed to fresco-secco...

 paintings. Villa Boscoreale was uncovered in 1900, revealing upon excavation many delineating nuances of luxurious Roman life. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

, together with King’s College, London, is building a virtual model of the Villa, linking these scattered works, based on a plan drawn at the time of excavation by archaeologist Felice Barnabei (1902)—who also made extensive notes—photographs taken of the excavation, the research of Phyllis W. Lehmann (1953), and axonometric drawings of the plan, locating the images on the walls, by Maxwell Anderson (1987). The construction consisted of a rustic villa of three stories, complete with baths, an underground passage to a stable and agricultural buildings, the latter not excavated. On the Barnabei plan, the central ground floor of the living quarters—the only remains partially intact—consisted of over thirty rooms or enclosures, surrounding, by a peristyle

Peristyle

In Hellenistic Greek and Roman architecture a peristyle is a columned porch or open colonnade in a building surrounding a court that may contain an internal garden. Tetrastoon is another name for this feature...

 walk, a colonnade

Colonnade

In classical architecture, a colonnade denotes a long sequence of columns joined by their entablature, often free-standing, or part of a building....

d courtyard. The building featured an impressive main entrance approached by five broad steps leading to a colonnaded forecourt.

Most of the representational work has characteristics of Greek, Hellenism or Classicism

Classicism

Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint...

. For instance, those found in the living room appear to be depictions of either philosophers, such as Epicurus

Epicurus

Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works...

, Zeno

Zeno of Citium

Zeno of Citium was a Greek philosopher from Citium . Zeno was the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, which he taught in Athens from about 300 BC. Based on the moral ideas of the Cynics, Stoicism laid great emphasis on goodness and peace of mind gained from living a life of virtue in...

 or Menedemus

Menedemus

Menedemus of Eretria was a Greek philosopher and founder of the Eretrian school. He learned philosophy first in Athens, and then, with his friend Asclepiades, he subsequently studied under Stilpo and Phaedo of Elis. Nothing survives of his philosophical views apart from a few scattered remarks...

, or possibly old kings, like King Kinyras of Cyprus. Similarly, the bedrooms described in Second Style also evoke Hellenistic qualities, such as are seen at the Tomb of Lyson or at Kallikles. At a time when the Roman Republic was ending and classicism somewhat fading, this is considered as an interesting comment on style and taste. Seemingly, Greek representations in the home were considered acceptable, even admired and sophisticated.The images survived the quick succession of Vesuvian cataclysms because of the skill of the fresco work and the absence of organic materials such as indigo

Indigo

Indigo is a color named after the purple dye derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and related species. The color is placed on the electromagnetic spectrum between about 420 and 450 nm in wavelength, placing it between blue and violet...

, murex

Murex

Murex is a genus of medium to large sized predatory tropical sea snails. These are carnivorous marine gastropod molluscs in the family Muricidae, commonly calle "murexes" or "rock snails"...

 purple, red madder

Madder

Rubia is a genus of the madder family Rubiaceae, which contains about 60 species of perennial scrambling or climbing herbs and sub-shrubs native to the Old World, Africa, temperate Asia and America...

 among its pigments. The reddening of some of its yellow ochre shows temperatures to have exceeded 300º C."

Metropolitan Museum cubiculum reconstruction

The fullest actual reconstruction from original materials at present is of a bedroom (cubiculum diurnum), one of the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum since 1903, and since 2007 a feature of the new Roman Gallery. It consists of most of a newly cleaned and reconstructed set of walls entirely painted in highly accomplished fresco. These spacious Roman Second Style murals represent their walls as open above socle

Socle

Socle may refer to:* Socle * Socle...

 or dado

Dado

Dado may refer to:* Dado , an architectural term* Dado , a woodworking joint* Dado , a Yugoslav-born painter* DADO, stage name of Canadian street theater performer* Dado, nickname of Israeli Lt. Gen...

 height, except for the architrave

Architrave

An architrave is the lintel or beam that rests on the capitals of the columns. It is an architectural element in Classical architecture.-Classical architecture:...

s above and a few columns that, together with those other features, frame vividly colored architectural views of buildings, columns, landscape, garden scenes, religious statues, beyond, emphasizing expansion and grandeur, but including no humans and only a few birds on the short, window wall. This is also the technique in other, unreconstructed, rooms. For example, In another bedroom, known as Room M, the frescoes depict columns that appear to expand into another room, giving the sense of a much larger, almost unending, space. The facing long walls (19 ft or 5.8 m) of the Metropolitan cubiculum are mirror images of each other, possibly by transfer, with variations. In addition, each is divided into four panels by depicted columns. Distance in these paintings is built up through a series of orthogonal architectural surfaces, and indicated by overlap occlusion

Occlusion

Occlusion may refer to:* Occlusion , the manner in which the upper and lower teeth come together when the mouth is closed* Occlusion effect, an audio phenomenon that occurs when one closes the opening into the ear canal and the loudness of low pitched sounds increases* Occlusion miliaria, a skin...

, foreshortening, diminution

Diminution

In Western music and music theory, diminution has four distinct meanings. Diminution may be a form of embellishment in which a long note is divided into a series of shorter, usually melodic, values...

, pronounced aerial perspective

Aerial perspective

Aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective refers to the effect the atmosphere has on the appearance of an object as it is viewed from a distance. As the distance between an object and a viewer increases, the contrast between the object and its background decreases, and the contrast of any...

, but without vanishing point

Vanishing point

A vanishing point is a point in a perspective drawing to which parallel lines not parallel to the image plane appear to converge. The number and placement of the vanishing points determines which perspective technique is being used...

s. Modelling is indicated by side-shading

Shading

Shading refers to depicting depth perception in 3D models or illustrations by varying levels of darkness.-Drawing:Shading is a process used in drawing for depicting levels of darkness on paper by applying media more densely or with a darker shade for darker areas, and less densely or with a lighter...

 with slight, selective cast shadow. Pompeian red in front planes, contrasting with the blue tone of the fainter, further planes, provides an additional effective cue for depth. The room had one, north-facing, outside window, through which pyroclastic flows from Vesuvius appear to have entered. As part of the sophisticated depictive scheme, the dado or lower parts of the walls are depicted as themselves, but in First Style. Ledges and niches there show near objects: "metal and glass vases on shelves and tables appearing to project out from the wall", playfully belying the common impression that perspective is always for depicting recession from the picture plane.In other parts of the Villa there are brightly colored nonfigurative walls, in First Style, some of which are on display at the Metropolitan and the Louvre Museum.

External links

• Romano-Campanian Wall-Painting

Sources

• Bettina Bergmann et al., Roman Frescoes from Boscoreale: The Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor in Reality and Virtual Reality (Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 62.4 [Spring 2010]).