I want to turn now, to what is surely, the, most important

surviving house, at the city of Pompeii. And this is the famous House of the Faun.

If you have, if you're in Pompeii, and you only have time to see two

houses, you go to the house of the Vettii, and the house of the Faun.

The house of the Faun, as you can see from your

monument list, dates to the Second Century BC for the most part.

And we see a view, a part of Pompeii

over here with a series of houses marked in yellow.

And the reason that I show this to you

is because the House of the Faun is particularly large.

You can see from this plan that it takes up, in fact,

the entire block, of, an, an entire block of the city of Pompeii.

And it is much larger than some of the

others, for example look at the House of the Vettii

over here.

It's, it's, almost, it's, it's twice if not larger than that, twice the

size of The House of the Vettii if not even more than that.

So, it's a a very large house clearly no expense was spared either in

accumulating the property and also in enhancing the decor of the house.

If we look at a plan of the House of the Faun we will see without

question that it corresponds and it follows the hellenized domus type.

[COUGH] We enter over here, we see it has a vestibulum,

a vestibulum, a fauces, two celli, one on either side, an atrium,

with an impluvium, the cubicula here on other side, the wings or

the alae, it does have a tablinum, we see it over here.

And then it has two,

two peristyle courts, with columns encircling them, a smaller

one and then a very large one in the back.

Note also while this is on the screen, that there

is a very interesting room that is located over here.

Its a rectangular room, it has a couple of

columns on bases and pilasters, one on either side.

It opens right off the peristyle court and on

the floor of that space which we call the Alexander

exedra, after Alexander The Great, because on the floor of that,

was the most famous mosaic that we have surviving from antiquity

that represents Alexander The Great and I'll show you that momentarily.

First let me show you what the house looks like from the outside.

It's well preserved. It doesn't have its ceiling

the way the House of the Vettii does, but otherwise, it's pretty well preserved.

We're looking down the street on which it finds itself.

You see the polygonal masonry blocks. You see the, the the,

the, you see the sidewalks here as well, and how modern they look.

You see the stepping stones.

And over here the facade of the House of the Faun.

You can see the entrance way, and you can see that the entrance

way has on either side a pilaster.

A pilaster with a Corinthian capital above, and

that's very important because it's announcing to us

as did that ideal hellenized domus that I

showed you before, it's announcing to us that

this is a patron, this is an owner of this particular house who has leanings toward

things Greek and wants us to know that

even before we have entered into the house.

You go into the house and stand in the vestibule you

will see that there's still quite a bit of decoration preserved.

The walls are painted with blocks, with

what looks like blocks of stone, an illusion.

This is an example of first style wall painting.

We're going to talk about that on Thursday, and

then up here a shrine is still preserved.

A shrine that probably held statues or statuettes of some of the household gods,

the revered gods for this family.

This is an excellent view because it shows us again how,

if you were entering this house, you would stand in the vestibule.

You'd go from there into the fauces, then into

the atrium, then into the peristyle that lay beyond.

The first smaller one and then the larger one after that.

But it shows us again, the point that I've made so many times already,

just in the, the, this first part of the semester, and that is this Roman

interest in vista, or panorama.

They've set up a view from the moment in which you enter the house.

A view of sequence of experiences from light, to dark,

to light, to dark, but also a sequence of visual

experiences, that make entering this house and walking through this

house an extraordinary experience, one that they have helped enhance.

And you can also see again the capitals here.

Here's a view of the atrium as it looks today.

We are standing in front of the impluvium.

In that impluvium is a statuette in bronze of

the dancing faun from which this house gets it name.

The one that you see there now is a copy

and the original is in the archaeological museum in Naples.

This view also shows you the way in which you had the

series of visual experiences from the

fauces, to the atrium, and ultimately toward

the peristyle with its wonderful forest of columns

done a la grecque, in the Greek style.

Here's another interesting view.

We're still in the atrium; you can see the dancing faun right here.

We're looking at the side wall if we're facing the faun.

This is the wall to the left.

This is very helpful because it shows us exactly what it, what,

what the, the cubicula that opened off the atrium, would have looked like.

You can see

that they were very dark.

Some of them had these tiny slit windows or perhaps slightly larger slit windows.

But for the most part, they were very dark, again, meant only as a

place to sleep at night and to be used for no other purpose then that.

You can also see from this, this view that this is a rubble wall that has

been stuccoed over u,h and that reliefs, painted

different colors, have been placed on that wall.

This is an example of so-called first

style Roman wall painting, and we'll go into what that was,

define what that was, and discuss it in more detail on Thursday.

This is a wonderful restored view of what the House of the Faun would

have looked like when all of its first style Roman wall painting was intact.

Showing what it would have looked like to stand in the atrium, and

look back through what survived of the tablinum with these very large pilasters.

Again, announcing the Greek leanings of this particular

patron, and then the view to, toward the peristyle

where you would also see the columns that look

like they were very much in the Greek style.

So here's clearly a person who not only is building

his home to correspond to the latest in domestic architecture

- namely the hellenized domus type - but who just

wants to make that point over and over and over again.

That he's cultivated,

that he knows things Greek.

And that he has the, the funds to be able to incorporate those into his house.

And indeed first style wall painting, as we'll find out when we

discuss it, is also a style that is based on Greek prototypes.

So another example of the Greek elements in this building.

What room do you think this is?

I can't, oh, I didn't show you this on the plan,

I neglected to, but you can look at your monument list.

You'll see that when you look at the plan,

you'll see that this house had more than one atrium.

It had two atria.

And this is one of them.

It's a tetrastyle atrium, because you can see, there are four columns, one around

each of the, of the, one around each corner of the impluvium.

So a house with two peristyles, a house with

two atriums, and even one of the atriums has four columns, as you can see here.

And this one is also very useful for the fact, one of you asked me a question when

we were looking at the Basilica Pompeii, about why

you know, why the columns look the way they did.

I think it was you, and you can see, I mentioned

that they were pieced and here you can see that very well,

these drums placed one on top of another, so that you can

see over time, how easy it would be for some of those

to fall off or become dismantled.

And for us to be left with a sort of thing that we

are left with when we look at what remains in the Basilica of Pompeii.

Here's a view obviously one of the peristyles, here you

will also see something interesting in terms of building technique.

The columns in Pompeii tend to be either of local stone, a local tufa, or made of

these brick, these tiles look like bricks. But then in either

case, stuccoed over, white, fluted to make them

look once again like they are marble columns,

the illusion that they are marble columns even

though they are not, to underscore their Greekness.

This is a view of the, that exedra, that Alexander exedra

that I mentioned to you before, that opens off the first peristyle.

With two columns on bases here.

Note the red at the bottom, white at the top.

Two pilasters painted red, as you can see.

And you can see the tourists standing there gazing down.

They're gazing down at a copy.

And this copy, by the way, for, for a very long time, for as long

as I remember going there, except for this last time I was there.

There was nothing there.

And, I think, most people had no realization

that this amazing mosaic, originally, was on the floor.

But they have put a copy; the mosaic is

now in the Naples Archaeological Museum, long ago moved there.

But they finally put a copy down on the floor.

So that the mosaic that was there.

So that people who visit the House of the Faun realize, oh this is where the

Alexander mosaic was located.

Which is particularly important because this is a view of the, of the mosaic.

This extraordinary mosaic of Alexander the Great

that's now in the Naples Archaeological Museum.

And of course you can see that they display it there,

as if it were a panel picture hanging on the wall.

But that is not how it was displayed or meant to be displayed in the

House of the Faun, it was a floor pavement in the House of the Faun.

But look how nicely, at least in

the museum, they have recreated the ambiance

by putting the columns and the pilasters.

They tried to recreate the sense of the exedra just as it is in the house,

it's just that they put the mosaic in the wrong place, it should be on the floor.

nonetheless, you can see it's an extraordinary work of art.

I'm not going to go into it in great detail, but I did

want to expose you to it, because it is so important, and so magnificent.

And I also want to make absolutely

sure that you don't miss when you go to the Naples, to the

Pompeii area, you do not miss going to the archaeological museum in Naples.

It's an amazing museum, one of the greatest of all the museums in Italy.

And it has, of course, almost all the great

stuff that comes from Pompeii, is at that museum, today.

So it's, another one of those asterisked must-sees.

You look at it here, it represents the battle between

Alexander and the Persian king Darius at the famous battle of Issus.

And at that battle, Alexander was victorious, and you see it here.

And one of the reasons that its so

important for our understanding of the House of the

Faun, is that we believe that this mosaic

was a copy of an earlier lost Greek painting.

A Greek

painting of the same scene, of Alexander and Darius, done in around 300

BC by a Greek painter. That was copied for this house in mosaic.

Sometime in the second century BC.

So, it's another example of this patron, of

this owner of the house, who is so besotted,

with Greek art, that he wants to have as much of it around him, as he possibly can.

And he clearly has the assets that enable him

to commission a mosaicist to make this amazing painting.

Now there are a lot of people who talk about this, this mosaic, excuse me.

A lot of people that talk about this mosaic and they say, well,

you know, it's such a pale reflection of what the painting would have

been, and, you know, it's a typical derivative Roman art that look at

Greek art derived from that they couldn't come up with anything on their own.

But

I would maintain, that's absolutely untrue, but I would also maintain, that to

do this kind of work in mosaic, rather than paint, is much more difficult.

I mean, this is a true tour de force, to be able to create this kind of active

battle scene, with collapsing horses and with with spears in the sky foreshortened.

And foreshortened weapons down here. This is an amazing thing

to do in mosaic.

When you think of all of these individual tesserae.

These small sto-, sto-, small stones, multi-colored stones that had to

be brought together, placed in mortar to create this amazing tableau.

To me, it seems like it is a much, much greater feat to have

to achieve that, and to achieve it so well, in mosaic than in paint.

Just quickly a couple of details.

Here's the one of Alexander

himself, on his horse.

It's an incredible characterization of the great Hellenistic general and king.

And you see him on his favorite horse,

Bucephalus, here and I think its a wonderful characterization

by this particular, very talented mosaicist and his

workshop to capture the relationship of man and horse.

I mean, if you look at not only the eyes but also at the hair, the hair

of Alexander, tousled, flowing in the wind, the mane

of the horse, so closely allied with one another.

The artist has really very effectively captured that again, even just using

these very small pieces of stone which you can see very well here.

Look at the way the shadows that are cast even by that stone.

It's incredible.

Here's the other detail that I'm going to show you of Darius in his chariot.

he, his driver,

as you can see he's looking toward Alexander.

He's mesmerized by the great hellenistic king, but he's at the same time afraid.

And he's beating a retreat, because you can

see that his driver has turned the chariot around.

He's whipping the horse, and he's heading in the

other direction, away from Alexander, as is this figure here.

We see his horse from the rear. A real tour de force of depicting a horse.

But he, too, is looking at Alexander, quite afraid, and

his horse is also turning, to go off into the distance.

So capturing this very dramatic moment, and

to me the most wonderful detail is this

one that you see down here, which is a view of one of the fallen Persians.

The shield is, is falling over on him, but the shield is, is, is, is

polished to such a shine that he can see the reflection of his own face.

I have a detail to show you of this.

He can see the reflection, you see it here, of his own face in that shield.

And this view is particularly good; I took this one

very close up so that you could see the individual stones.

You don't, you know, from a distance, they blend.

When you go up close, you can really see oh yeah that's, that's a mosaic.

And it's really an extraordinary work of art.

Very quick question, because. >> How, how big are the stones?

>> They're very small.

They're very small. And the

reason for that is in large part so that they will blend

ultimately, and from a distance it will have the feel of a painting.

Certainly when it's on the wall, probably less so when

you stood and looked at it in its original location.

Because, you'd be looking down on it and you'd be closer to it than here.

But it's an amazing work and, again, remember.

That although, the original painting, done by the Greek painter was probably,

did hang on a wall, this one was meant as a floor mosaic

in this house.

But again, a testament to the Greek leanings of this particular patron.

5.4 The House of the Faun

Roman Architecture

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