Because of this and because of the columns, the projecting
columns, many scholars have suggested that there's some relationship between
this and theatrical Roman, theatrical architecture.
Theatrical architecture that was probably stage sets and the
like that were probably initially made out of wood.
That don't survive any longer.
And that these may imitate a sum of those stage sets
and that this may be an actual curtain used in theatrical performances.
But there are other ways to think about those black curtains,
so to speak, and I think we don't have time to do
that here now, but we should definitely engage on that in the online forum.
I want to show you, oh, and I do want to say one last
thing, we're going to look at one more
example of second style Roman wall painting.
One thing, one distinction that I want to make between the
first and the second style is, while the first style of
Roman wall painting was a Greek import, there is nothing like
the second style as we've just described it anywhere in Greek art.
The second style of Roman wall painting is without
any question a Roman innovation, and an extraordinary Roman
innovation at that, and one that is very closely
aligned with developments in architecture as we've described them.
This is another example, the, the
villa Publius Fannius Synistor, second style painting.
Dates to 50 to 40 BC. It was in that town of
Boscoreale that I showed you on the map before between Herculaneum and Pompeii.
And it was removed from there at one point and made its way to New York.
It is now in the Metropolitan and has been
for a long time, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It is usually referred to as the Met Cubiculum, and if
you haven't seen it, you should go down and see it.
It is most extraordinary.
They've tried to recreate, the paintings are
all ancient, but they've tried to recreate
the ambiance by putting a black and white mosaic on the
floor and giving us a nice, comfortable, sort of, bed, and a
footstool over here, that are you know, just the kind of thing
that you would've seen in that room, although they don't actually belong.
And they've added a window, and so on and so forth.
But the paintings are all, are, are
genuine ancient paintings, and what's amazing is,
we have the entire spread of the room, and actually, there are mirror images.
The scenes are mirror images of one another across the two long walls.
I want to show you just a couple of details.
This is a detail from that room.
They chose a tholos seen through columns.
Once again we see here, there's example of second style but it's a little bit more
developed here, because you can see that the
first style wall has really been dropped down now.
And in fact, it doesn't even look like a first
style wall anymore.
It just looks like a red parapet with a, with a green frieze, and a
little cornice at the top, but it doesn't really look like a, a first style wall.
In fact, it looks like a wall with a gate that
doesn't look like there is any knob or anything like that.
So we kind of wonder, can we get into this?
Do we have to jump over it?
How do we get from here into what lies beyond?
We're not absolutely sure. But we see a tholos once again,
one of these sort of sacred shrines.
And here, you can see, it is surrounded by a peristyle, by columns.
A peristyle just like one might find in a house.
In a house or in a villa. So what are we looking at here?
We have, we, we see columns that support a
pediment, the pediment if you look, a triangular pediment.
What's interesting about it is, it's broken at the bottom.
The Greeks would never break their pediments.
The
Romans have broken this pediment to allow space
for the tholos to rise up between it.
That's a very interesting thing to do.
And it shows, well, on one hand, they respect ancient Greek architecture.
They're also willing to depart from it and break the rules, so to speak.
And we're going to see, that's that's emphasized by the Romans later on.
So the tholos here, so we have these different elements.
We have the columns projecting toward us. We have the wall of
the, of the gateway.
We also have this view through the window, picture window into what lies beyond.
And, we seem to have these black curtains again.
In fact, we have three of these black curtains.
So we ask ourselves again, what are those exactly.
[COUGH] Another view, just showing you this
in relationship to the House of the Fawn.
