Much more important for the development of Roman painting is another house that I'm going to show you. Oops, okay, I was going to show you. Here, which is room two in the house of the Griffins. And while, and this dates a little bit later, it was done between 80 and 60 BC. And we look at this, we will see that there are beginning to be some important changes here. As you look at this, you see we're looking at a barrel vaulted room once again. Walls decorate, well, all three walls well decorated and very well preserved so we can see exactly what's going on here. As we look quickly we see remnants of the first style wall. We see that we have the same architectural zones, the plints, the orthostats, the isodomic, isodomic courses, and we have the same idea of marble. You can see that these variegated marble blocks and these red red panels are meant to look, again, like marble. Although this is done entirely in paint. There is no stucco done, used in this room whatsoever. Stucco is not used anywhere here. This is completely flat and it is painted as an illusionistic view. But as we look at this we see, although we get a sense of that that first style wall is kind of still present we also see some, again, very important changes. We see the way in which they've treated the socle here to create these kinds of illusionistic cubes that look almost as if they're projecting out into our space. Look also at what they've done by adding columns, columns that stand on bases, this colonnade that seems to encircle the room the way a peristyle encircles a garden court. This introduction of columnar architecture, again clearly under the influence of Greek architecture and clearly commensurate with what they're doing in temple architecture, what they're doing in in in sanctuary architecture, and also in house architecture. So we see those columns, and it looks as if those columns are resting on bases that are represented in, as if they are receding into the background. The artist has paid a lot of attention to trying to render them perspectively. So although all of this is done in paint, we get the impression that what we're looking at is a colonnade that is in front of the wall, it projects into the spectator's space, and that what lies behind it is a kind of First Style wall. This is the very beginnings of what we call Second Style Roman wall painting: this introduction of columns; this introduction of elements that project into the viewer's space; this sense that you are looking at two levels of space, the level of space that is the wall and then the level of space that projects in front of it. And look at the columns, at the top of the columns you will see, they hold lintels, but those lintels also are shown as if they're receding into depth. And you can sort of barely see, and you'll see this better as you study this on the, in the online images, you'll be able to see the actual coffered ceiling, that is represented on the top or underneath those lintels, which again, indicate that this is being, this is being represented in depth. [COUGH] And here you can see exactly what they're trying to do. They're trying to use paint and only paint to recreate the sort of thing that we saw in built architecture in the oecus in the house of the silver wedding, these columns that project in front of a painted wall. This is the pièce de résistance of what we call second style Roman wall painting. This is the preeminent example of mature second style Roman wall painting. It is a, scene in the Villa of the Mysteries, it's in one of the cubicula, cubicula, Cubiculum 16, at the Villa of the Mysteries, in Pompeii. It dates to 60 to 50 BC. It's a further development of what we saw in room two of the house of the Griffins. We see, the first style wall is still present, we see the plinth, we see the socle, we see the orthostats, we see the isodomic blocks. Although they are done entirely in paint. Again no, stucco here whatsoever. We see the columns have also been added as is typical of second style. But here the columns are even more interesting, because we can see that the columns not only project from the wall themselves, but they support an entablature, an entablature which projects out toward the spectator, and they tried to make that look as if it recedes into depth. We see another set of columns here that support and straight lintel, but then look, the, the lintel arches up in the center. This is called an arculated lintel. An arculated lintel. We have not seen an arculated lintel in built architecture. This is very early, 60 to 50 BC. We are seeing it here. Why are we seeing it here, and why are we not seeing it in built architecture is a very interesting issue, and one we could debate in the online forum. We see that that First Style wall has been, oh, and we also see columns that support one of these lintels with a coffered ceiling, the brown coffered ceiling up at the uppermost part. The First Style wall, there's a very complex painting, and a very interesting painting intellectually. The first style wall has been, it's there, but it's been dropped down. It's been dropped down, and now we can see something that lies behind, behind that first style wall. We see a view of, of this round, structure called a tholos, a round tholos, it's like the tholos that was at the top of the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina. It's a shrine of some sort, and that shrine is surrounded by blue sky. So that's something that's presumably outside. So the first style wall has been dropped down, and now we have this vista, or panorama of something that lies outside the wall. So we in a sense have three zones of space. We have the columns that project into the spectator space. We have the First Style, or what's left of the First Style wall. And then we see a view through the wall, to something that lies beyond: a vista, a panorama, a window. It's like opening up the wall as a window, to what lies beyond. It's fictive again, in the same way that First Style wall painting was fictive. It creates an illusion of something that is there, that isn't really there. And it coincides, certainly, with the kind of development we've been tracing also in built architecture, this opening up of the house, opening up of the windows, opening up the bay windows to views that lie beyond. There's also these mysterious things that are called, that people usually refer to as the black curtains in second style Roman wall painting. You can see this black element that looks almost as if it were a curtain that's been dropped down to reveal the scene that lies beyond. 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. And this whole idea of vista and panorama are from one part to another. We see the same thing happening in painting as we see happening in that. And then one last detail of the of the Publius Fannius Met Cubiculum over here, a very interesting detail, and I, I urge you to, to explore this on your own, because it's so fascinating in detail. This doorway and then, most interesting of all, this panoply of structures that are, that seem to be piled, one on top of another, in a series of stories. This again is very early, it's 60, it's 50 to 40, 50 to 40 B.C. We don't see anything like that in built architecture then. We only see second stories beginning to be added in Pompeiian structures, Herculaneum structures, between the earthquake and the, and Vesuvius, between 62 and 79. But here already in the mid century BC, we see this depicted in paint. Is this fanciful? Is it based on something that was built in wood that no longer survives? These are questions, perhaps unanswerable questions, but one, ones well worth pondering.
