A seated male and a standing woman lock gazes (Fig. 8.1). The man, a cap over his unkempt hair and holding a traveler’s staff across his lap, sits on a column drum in an open pose, his body turned toward the viewer. The woman, in contrast, stands upright, in profile, her left arm across her waist with a spindle and distaff in hand, while her right fingers rise to touch her chin. The couple’s identities are clear from his scraggly appearance and pointed cap and from her characteristic gesture of thought. They are identifiable from the situation itself. Indeed, this is one of the most famous recognition scenes in ancient literature: Ulysses, disguised as a beggar, has returned to Ithaca after twenty years.
Figure 8.1
Ulysses and Penelope. In situ, Macellum, Pompeii, ca. 60 ce.
Is Penelope puzzled, in doubt, or at this very second seeing her husband for who he really is? The static, protracted confrontation remains unresolved, leaving the viewer in suspense about both their states of mind. Tension is heightened by the presence of another viewer, a female peering over a wall, who mirrors our own observation of the couple. In this way, differing points of view and levels of awareness intersect, both within and without the picture. The emphasis on looking is not without irony, for it will be not be Ulysses’ visual appearance, but his words that ultimately reveal his true identity. Resolution of the impasse requires a storyteller, and we are invited to supply, in the mind’s eye, past and future events and even the verbal exchange between the two.
The encounter of Ulysses and Penelope, a classic example of anagnorisis (recognition, discovery, disclosure), introduces the topic of this essay: how seeing and knowing are depicted in Roman mythological painting. In Homer’s epic, Ulysses’ homecoming occurs gradually, as a series of revelations of his true identity through the senses, primarily through vision, but also touch (the scar) and scent (Argos), as well as memory. The hero’s successful return and physical survival depend upon the perceptions of others. The female onlooker in the fresco may well be Ulysses’ nurse Eurycleia, who has earlier identified him by the scar on his leg, while this moment, the final recognition of husband by wife, will secure Ulysses’ return to his former self. It was a popular scene in visual media and theater from the 6th century bce and appears in several Campanian frescoes of the 1st century CE, such as this panel in the Macellum in Pompeii. None of these visual representations matches a specific textual passage, but all simply present the most easily recognizable elements of the reunion.1
Moments in which characters experience different kinds of vision, and thus knowledge, were extremely popular in Roman art, yet they have never been studied as a theme. Wall paintings depict far more than the classic anagnorisis, the identification of a lost kin,2 by including a range of mental and emotional states: foresight, flashbacks, epiphanies, hallucinations, blindness, rapture, lapsed memory, and metamorphosis. The following essay articulates some of the ways in which seeing is represented on painted walls. We extend the analysis from the viewpoints of figures within a picture to those of external spectators like ourselves, for it is the act of looking that collapses the distance between ancient and modern viewers: we respond to the same scenes that Romans saw. This fact should not imply that those responses are the same. In fact, ancient optical theories suggest that vision was experienced quite differently from modern, Western viewing habits, which have been shaped by photography, screens, and the moving image.3
Figure 8.2
Paris and Helen. MANN 114320, from the House of Jason, Pompeii (IX.5,18), ca. 10 bce.
How might ancient spectators have recognized and how do we recognize what is happening in a picture? Here a visual vocabulary is crucial. The viewer needs to know which poses and gestures in ancient art convey certain states of mind and how compositional structures invoke particular types of situations. Consider the encounter between Ulysses and Penelope. The formula appears in a panel from the House of Jason, where a seated Paris tries to persuade, or test, a standing Helen, whose left arm, like Penelope’s, is bent and covered with drapery (Fig. 8.2). There are differences. Paris, a prince and no beggar like Ulysses, wears fancy robes, and Helen’s bare right arm hangs loose rather than rising to touch her lips in thought; the third figure, Eros, is not a mere onlooker, but steps from the doorway between the two, urging them on. Despite the variations, the separation of the figures and the traffic of gazes across the space convey a pause, a confrontation, a moment of decision between a man and a woman. The two scenes actually were paired in a reception room painted in the Augustan period in the House of the Five Skeletons (VI.10.2); the parallel configuration must have invited a comparison in which a straying Helen emerges as the antithesis of the good wife, Penelope.4
Because most modern viewers come to know the stories through texts, it is tempting to see the frescoes as illustrations, or to cite literary passages as explanatory captions. Indeed, analogies between paintings and texts abound. Some images also recall descriptions of performances, especially pantomime dances. Yet attempts to match frescoes with specific passages or with transitory spectacles inevitably falter due to the distinct nature of each medium. Such attempts reduce the nuances of each to a few common denominators and overlook the conditions of their making and reception. Erudite Roman writers and professional performers lived and worked quite differently from each other and from the anonymous workshop craftsmen who painted walls and laid mosaic floors. So too, readers, auditors, and spectators encountered the stories in quite specific and dissimilar contexts. The painted static scenes were physically present in the viewer’s space, to be seen over time, and ignoring the experiential reception of the pictures misses their open-ended narrative power.
That said, one cannot deny that images, texts, and performances share a vocabulary of figural types and structures of seeing and narrating. On painted walls, schemata known from earlier statues, paintings, and mosaics operated as quotations with meaningful associations.5 Similarly, pantomime performers drew upon the audience’s knowledge by ending their routine with frozen poses (schemata) imitating a famous statue or painting.6 These visual topoi established connections among discrete stories, constituting an intermediality that resembles the intertextuality of mythical exempla in written narratives. Even more intriguing correspondences emerge in the thematic groupings of three or four scenes in painted rooms, where juxtapositions invited cross-referential readings.7
No work comes closer to the fluid interlocking of heroic and divine fabulae than the Metamorphoses.8 Just as individual paintings have been cut from their walls, so too episodes of Ovid’s text often are studied individually. Yet it is only when they are read together, in succession, that Ovid’s techniques of visualization and of slipping from one tale to another show that multiple voices and viewpoints emerge.9 Something similar happens when one looks at the scenes within the space of a room. As Philip Hardie has said of the Metamorphoses: “The reader’s view is frequently focalised and guided through the astonished gaze of spectators within the text, so inviting our own presence at the visual feast of the poem.”10 Likewise, the perspectives of internal viewers shape the spectator’s understanding of events, while novel combinations invite alternative narratives within the stories.11
We begin by looking at a few individual panels now removed from their walls and placed in the Naples Archaeological Museum. Ranging from quiet moments, such as that of Ulysses and Penelope, to dramatic, action-packed turning points, they show how wall painters could communicate varying perspectives and states of knowledge within a single scene and thus enable an external viewer to see the situation through different sets of eyes. We then consider groupings of pictures within rooms. What happens when three or four scenes, each filled with multiple internal onlookers, surround a living spectator? The cognitive process of that spectator (whether ancient or modern), who becomes immersed in concurrent, intersecting perceptions and emotions, indicates a level of complexity and subtlety not yet acknowledged.
1 Seeing and Knowing
Figure 8.3
Europa on the Bull. MANN 111475, from the House of Jason (IX.5.18), ca. 10 BCE.
Appearances are deceptive, and doubt about the reliability of vision lies at the core of mythological scenes. A whimsical spin on disguise can be seen in a fresco from the House of Jason (IX.5.18), painted in about 10 bce (Fig. 8.3).12 A bull has appeared on the shore where Europa and her well-dressed companions have assembled. Instantly entranced by the gorgeous creature’s magnetism, Europa has climbed onto the bull’s back, her torso exposed, her right arm lifting the veil above her head to reveal herself while her left hand, holding a ribbon, reaches for one of the animal’s small (and unthreatening) horns. A friend, garment slipping down her arm, wraps a floral garland around the creature’s bulging neck and appears ready to lean forward and plant a kiss on the bull, while two more companions may be queueing to do the same. The innocent, wide-eyed young women may see a bull, but they seem to sense something more and are preparing to assert themselves.13 We know the “bull” to be a divine disguise, a visual ruse that a split second later will launch a whirlwind abduction across the sea (and the painting may well be assuming that we can visualize the more popular and more dramatic scene on Pompeian walls of the bull charging over the waves, Europa’s drapery fluttering in the wind as she looks back at shore).14 The god looks directly out of the picture, either working his charms or indicating his ruse to us as spectators. A knowledgeable viewer can foresee what will come, but is powerless to warn Europa and stop the impending violence. The ominous inevitability inherent in viewers’ familiarity with the tale heightens their awareness of the peril threatening the trusting young female mortals.
Our role as spectator is less collusive, yet more complicated with an enormous panel from the House of the Citharist (I.4.5; Fig. 8.4).15 The eye immediately goes to the magnificent figure of Bacchus, resplendent in flowing garments, an ivy wreath atop his long, curly locks, a leopard-skin draped across his chest, and a fennel staff, the thyrsos, in his right hand. We witness an epiphany, a sight to astound. In the picture, however, the god himself is astounded by the sight of a mortal woman, Ariadne. He halts so suddenly that his drapery flutters around him. Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, is oblivious, lying in a deep sleep with her back to us, her head and arms in the lap of a winged personification, probably Hypnos (Sleep), who lifts a branch from a bowl to sprinkle poppy seeds over her eyes. As Eros at the center of the composition unveils Ariadne’s body and Hypnos keeps her asleep, the two look up to the god gazing down at the bared woman and our eyes follow theirs, and his. In the background, Bacchus’s entourage reacts to the god’s reaction. On the left, a dark-skinned, bearded Pan raises his hand, fingers splayed wide in a gesture of aposkopein, the shielding of the eyes from an overpowering vision; behind him, flute-playing Bacchantes widen their eyes; and at the right a satyr helps old Silenus climb a hill, informing him of what is happening. Still further in the upper distance another satyr signals to a comrade below, next to Silenus, echoing Pan’s hand gesture of astonishment. The visual shock reverberates far into the landscape.
Figure 8.4
Bacchus and Ariadne. MANN 9286, from House of the Citharist Pompeii (I, 4, 25), ca. 60–79 ce.
Ancient viewers would know what comes next. This was the most popular myth on Pompeian walls.16 But beyond recognizing the story, the spectator is invited to interact with it. Unable to see what Bacchus does, we witness a god’s awe, and the alert onlookers lure us to feeling amazement. Just as Bacchus can gaze at Ariadne for as long as she sleeps, we can explore the many aspects of this arrested moment in our own time. We can linger on Ariadne’s exposed backside but only can imagine the god’s view of her front, a compositional device of hiding that adds an erotic frisson and, as we shall see, is extremely effective in Roman visual narratives.
Jupiter’s ruse and Bacchus’s epiphany stimulate varying degrees of awareness among internal and external viewers. Europa and Bacchus are both awe-struck, in one case a mortal woman is captivated by a male god disguised as a beast, and in the other a male god is mesmerized by an unconscious mortal woman. Those around them register the impact of what Europa and Bacchus see. In another picture, we are again privy to an epiphany, but the reactions of internal viewers clash with, rather than reinforce, the visual wonderment. A tour-de-force of a visual narrative combining divergent ways of seeing and not seeing, and thus different degrees of knowing, is the “Sacrifice of Iphigenia” (Fig. 8.5). It is a unique composition with two horizontal zones. Below, the frontally-posed figures form a row like a chorus line and together convey fluctuating states of mind and emotion. The focal point is the vulnerable Iphigenia, her eyes cast upwards and her nude body on full display, but we are the only ones looking at her. At the right, the blind seer Calchas, holding the knife and ribbons for Iphigenia’s sacrifice, shifts his gaze to the sky and raises a right finger to his lips in a gesture of surprise, insight, perhaps speech. At the far left, beside the statue of Diana, Iphigenia’s father Agamemnon stands as an antithesis to the omniscient seer by turning away, head veiled and hand over his eyes, believing that he knows what is happening but is doubly-blinded to what actually transpires. Meanwhile, the men in the center holding Iphigenia, presumably Ulysses and Menelaus, are turning in opposite directions, one to face Calchas, the other apparently toward Diana’s statue (who is also gazing upward) or directly to the sky, as if they already are responding to the sudden shift in events to come while recognizing the presence of divine forces at work.
Figure 8.5
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia. MANN 9112, from the peristyle, House of the Tragic Poet (VI.8.5), ca. 60–79 ce.
Everyone appears locked into his or her own reaction; only we can put them all together and become aware of a flash forward to the upper zone, like a seer or god—normally impossible with physical mortal eyes—and witness an epiphany of Diana. The goddess, partially emerging as if from a cloud, repeats Calchas’ gesture of finger to lips as she looks at Iphigenia, who flies through the sky, glancing backward while grasping the antlers of the sacred deer that has replaced her. Omitted from the scene is a portrayal of the moment when she is whisked from the altar; the before (below) and after (above) events leave us to fill in, from our previous familiarity with the tale, the goddess’s miraculous intervention.17
The fresco appeared alone in the small peristyle of the House of the Tragic Poet (VI.8.5) but is connected with scenes in other rooms featuring females in the Trojan War.18 It is often regarded as a copy of a 5th-century bce picture by Timanthes, a composition praised by several Roman authors for the artist’s rendering of divergent responses. Writing in the early 1st century, Valerius Maximus highlights the range of emotions in the original painting: “Consider too that other no less famous painter who portrayed the grievous sacrifice of Iphigenia, placing a sad Calchas, a mournful Ulysses and a lamenting Menelaus around the altar. Did he not confess by veiling Agamemnon’s head that the bitterness of deepest grief cannot be expressed by art? So his painting is wet with the tears of the soothsayer, the friend and the brother, but left the father’s weeping to be judged by the emotions of the spectator” (8.11).19 The Pompeian fresco, like the original, presents a multidimensional situation, a kind of “Rashomon” story line that can only unfold in the time it takes for the external viewer to make out the dramatically shifting cognitive states of foresight, terror, and liberation in the various characters portrayed, and, most ingeniously, to supply in the mind’s eye the father’s hidden emotions, thereby adding the spectator’s own reaction to the cacophony of impressions.
For an entirely different engagement with opposing perspectives, we turn to one of the most popular recognition scenes in Roman art, the discovery of Achilles on Scyros (Fig. 8.6 left).20 The hero, disguised as a female, has been hiding among the daughters of King Lycomedes until cunning Ulysses tracks him down and catches him by burying armor among the female gifts that he and Diomedes bring to court. In this moment, the trap is sprung and delivers a shock. Achilles, tricked by the sight of weapons and the sound of the war trumpet, instantly springs into action, revealing his true identity. Like a sensational climax on stage, women and soldiers crowd around him with dynamic, diagonal movements, wide-eyed expressions, raised arms and splayed hands, while at the pinnacle of the compositional pyramid the looming, elderly king Lycomedes gazes out past us into another time and space.21
Figure 8.6
Left: Achilles Discovered on Scyros. MANN 116085, from the House of Achilles or Domus Uboni (IX.5.2), ca. 60–79 CE. Right: Achilles and Chiron. MANN 9109, from the so-called Basilica in Herculaneum, ca. 65–79 ce.
Unlike the narratives of Europa and Iphigenia, the external viewer witnesses the live action along with spectators within the picture. No god is present. Mortality has been foretold: Achilles’ biology is his destiny.22 What transpires simulates a metamorphosis before our very eyes, and the transition from female to male performed by the hero’s body requires a viewer’s recognition of coded signs and gestures for feminine and masculine. Light-skinned and beardless with long hair, Achilles’ flowing robe hides his genitals, and Ulysses grips his forearm in the formulaic gesture for a male abduction or rape. As the drapery and disguise fall from his pale skin, Achilles drops a mirror, the female device of reflection, and grabs the bronze shield, an emblem of his masculine military future. Ulysses’ and Diomedes’ tanned bodies contrast with the hero’s white skin, as Achilles moves towards Ulysses and the male world of war, yet looks back to his beloved, a similarly pale Deidameia, and the enclave of feminine domesticity. The animated male and female faces and gestures surrounding him echo and clash with each other.23
Embedded within the frenzy is a flashback. The shield’s reflection captures, in miniature, a memory of Achilles’ childhood training by the centaur Chiron as the elderly tutor instructs the young hero how to play the lyre, educating him in the liberal arts as well as hunting and survival (Fig. 8.6 right). In a schema known from a popular marble statue group erected in the Saepta Julia in Rome in the Augustan period (Plin. NH 36.29), the centaur’s arm encircles Achilles in a tender embrace that echoes Diomedes’ grasp in the main scene. The “reflection” of an analeptic sign conjures up retrospectively Achilles’ youth, just as he moves along an inevitable trajectory toward adulthood, war, and death.24 Although all is happening in an instant, the pictured scene encapsulates past and future. Notably, it is not the hero’s appearance, but his instinctual, physical reaction to seeing armor and hearing the war trumpet that unveils his true identity.
Figure 8.7
Top center: Room R, House of Golden Cupids, Pompeii (VI.16.7), mid-1st century bce; In situ, left: Actaeon spying on Diana; bottom: Leda and the Swan; right: Venus Fishing.
Gender is a theme that pervades mythological scenes on Pompeian walls. Each of the panels we have seen so far presents an alluring body, either of a mortal female (Europa, Iphigenia, Ariadne, Deidameia), of an omnisexual god (Bacchus), or of a gender-bending hero (Achilles). While voyeurism is clearly involved in viewing these bodies, it forms the main subject of a panel in a room of the House of the Gilded Cupids (VI.16.7). The hunter Actaeon has just chanced upon the virgin goddess Diana bathing in a woodland stream (Fig. 8.7 left).25 In alarm he raises a splayed hand—the same gesture flashed by Pan witnessing Bacchus’ sight of Ariadne. Actaeon possesses a hunter’s acute tracking vision, but in this case, his catch is visual, an accident, and an epiphany.26 More than that, it is erotic, and Actaeon is portrayed as more than a mortal invading a god’s space; he is a male voyeur. As Ovid has Diana say to Actaeon: “Tell people you have seen me, Diana, naked! Tell them if you can!” (Met. 3.192–193).27 The scene is proleptic and jumps ahead, for even before the goddess turns to splash him with water, a stag’s horn already is sprouting from his forehead; he is losing his human form and with it, the ability to speak.28
Although Actaeon’s raised hand emphatically warns us not to look, there is scarcely time to register it before the goddess’s large, sinuous, light-skinned body catches our eye. Our joint voyeurism is enhanced by the painter’s use of a cliched sex symbol, the famous statue type of Venus after her bath, who, sensing an intruder, moves to cover her breasts and groin (Fig. 8.8). But what is happening here? This is Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt, being depicted in the guise of her rival and antithesis, the seductress Venus. How better to capture the power of Actaeon’s rapturous, yet lethal vision than by presenting female beauty in its most sensuous form? We have as it were a front row seat, and perhaps a growing awareness that at any moment the goddess could shift her attention from Actaeon and catch us looking. And there is more, namely a mirroring and a double crime, for as the goddess instinctively shields her frontal body, her backside is entirely exposed to Actaeon’s gaze. The two-sided viewing of the female body—already captured in Bacchus’s privileged view of Ariadne—speaks directly to debates about which is preferable—the front or the back—a trope in Hellenistic and Latin literature that is intrinsic to the viewing of nude statues of women and hermaphrodites.29
Figure 8.8
Left and right: “Venus Pudica,” marble statue of Aphrodite, Dresden-Capitoline type, British Museum 1934,0301.1, ca. 100–150 CE; center: Actaeon spying on Diana (cf. Fig. 8.7)
In this room in the House of the Gilded Cupids, the viewer is surrounded by erotic female nudes. On the back wall, adjacent to the panel of Actaeon and Diana, the Venus schema reappears in the figure of Leda, this time in an interior space and displaying a much less defensive pose (Fig. 8.7 center). Instead of Actaeon’s alarm signal, Eros stands calmly by, holding a torch, and Leda’s open body language, lifted arm, and eye contact with the swan are indicative of receptiveness. What we see, then, is the appropriation of a well-known schema of Venus, first for another goddess, Diana, and then for Leda, the mortal object of Jupiter’s desire. Goddess and mortal are both subject of the male gaze, but the likeness stops there, for the situations portend quite different outcomes: Leda, enamored with the swan, will succumb to Jupiter, but Diana will unleash her fury on Actaeon. Meanwhile, to the right on the third wall, Venus herself, the moving power behind these encounters, sits fishing at her leisure with her companion erotes (Fig. 8.7 right).30 On one level, the room offers a titillating series of female nudes. On another, the familiar message emerges: gods rule, innocent mortals lose.
Figure 8.9
The Death of Pentheus. In situ, Room N, House of the Vettii, Pompeii (VI.15.1), 60–79 CE.
A far more violent scene comprising entirely different experiences of sight forms the backdrop of a dining room in the House of the Vettii (VI.15.1; Fig. 8.9). The external viewer remains outside the picture and observes a balanced composition in which bodies turn outward as if posing on a stage. A group of five women are flailing their arms in an ecstatic Bacchic trance, their garments fluttering away to reveal their breasts. The object of their—and our—attention is the central male, his nude body on display, about to be battered with a rock, stabbed with a thyrsus, and torn limb from limb. While the maenad on the right grabs his left arm with both of hers, the blue-clad figure on the left is especially aggressive, pinning down his leg with her foot, grabbing him by the hair with one hand, and aiming her thyrsus at him with the other. This is Agave attacking her own son Pentheus. Theirs is a tragic failure of communication: as he gazes up at her and gestures for mercy, in her mania she sees, not her pleading son, but the prized prey, a boar whose head she will later parade on a staff through Thebes, until (we imagine) she regains consciousness of another kind and recognizes that she has in fact beheaded her son.31 Bacchus is invisible, revealing himself through the women’s frenzied movements. We, in contrast, possess a clarity of vision, seeing Pentheus for the man he is and at the same time witnessing the women’s inability to see him as we do. The maenads’ mania-induced hallucinations blind them; our physical sight reveals the objective truth.
Anyone familiar with the story could narrate what preceded the attack and what would follow. Just before this moment, Pentheus, disguised as a woman (as was Achilles), has been spying with profane eyes upon the sacred rites of Bacchus. His mother is the first to see him, but not as himself or as a man in a disguise, rather as an animal. “No sooner does she spot the spy—whom she considers a wild animal—than she rushes wildly at him and hurls her thyrsus.”32 While Pentheus beseeches his aunts, Ino and Autonoe, for mercy, they tear him limb from limb; when he asks his mother to “see” that he is really her son (adspice, mater 3.725), Agave shows no pity.
The painting offers a unique viewing experience. His relatives do not see or know Pentheus, reversing the typical anagnorisis of lost kin, and also reversing the typical power relations between women and men.33 We witness the women experiencing mania-induced hallucinations, but cannot see what they are seeing. Theirs is a different kind of blindness from that of Europa or Leda, unable to penetrate Jupiter’s disguises as a bull and a swan. Bacchus, god of altered states, controls mortals’ vision and their grasp of reality. To Ovid, Actaeon’s sight had been a “mistake” (error, Met. 3.142) while his Pentheus confesses “that he had sinned” (pecasse, Met. 3.701–733), yet both Diana and Bacchus exact grisly revenge against the intruding voyeurs by having them ripped to pieces, Actaeon by his hunting hounds and Pentheus by his mother and sisters.34
Figure 8.10
Top: Room N, House of the Vettii, Pompeii (VI.15.1), 60–79 CE. Left: Baby Hercules; bottom: The Death of Pentheus (cf. Fig. 8.9); right: Dirce and her Stepsons.
The shared schemata and narrative associations in this dining room in the House of the Vettii have been well studied (Fig. 8.10).35 Pentheus’s dramatic, full-frontal pose, with one arm and one leg outstretched at a diagonal angle, head twisted and thrown back, further exposes his powerlessness and invokes the iconic posture of pathos of the Pergamon Altar, where Alcyoneus succumbs to Athena while his mother Gaia desperately beseeches the goddess to spare him. The staged poses of centrally placed nude figures are repeated on the side walls, on the left in baby Hercules strangling the snakes and on the right in Dirce being tied to the bull by her stepsons. All are domestic situations at Thebes featuring mothers or stepmothers (Agave, Alcmene, Juno, Dirce) and sons (Pentheus and three sons of Jupiter: Hercules, Amphion and Zethus) in a zigzagging pattern of family dynamics. Stephen Wheeler describes an analogous method used by Ovid to link tales through repeated figural types, saying that the “Daphne, Io, and Phaethon tales unfold as scenes in a serial family drama, in which the same character types recur: father, daughter, and lover, or father, mother, and son. Ovid … maintains continuity by substituting different mythological figures in the same stock roles … a common theme in all these stories is the increasing loss of parental control over the destiny of their children.”36
In two scenes in this room mortals are punished by their own relatives, namely the mother and aunts of Pentheus and the stepsons of Dirce (a worshipper of Bacchus), but in the third parental glory shines upon baby Hercules, the one happy outcome in a room that is sometimes called “the chamber of horrors.”37 That scene teases the viewer with a play of appearances. Directly above Hercules the golden eagle must be Jupiter himself delighting in his son’s prowess. The bearded male on the right reacting to the feat with astonishment, with finger raised to lips, would seem to be the mortal father Amphitryon, whose guise Jupiter had assumed to seduce Alcmene. But the figure wears a wreath, holds a scepter, and sits on a throne decorated with a prominent eagle. How can we know (if even Alcmene couldn’t), whether this is the mortal husband or Jupiter in disguise? Could he be both?38
Although not a direct influence on the ensemble in the House of the Vettii, Book 3 of the Metamorphoses offers an illuminating perspective on forbidden sight as a connecting theme. Narcissus suffered by seeing someone he should not (a simulacrum of himself), and his fate resonates with the preceding tales of Actaeon and Semele encountering gods, as it does with the following story, that of Pentheus.39 A viewer conversant with the Metamorphoses might remember the prophecy of blind Tiresias, who predicted that Pentheus would die a violent death after seeing something that he should not, only then to be taunted by Pentheus for his lack of sight (Met. 3.511–527). Tiresias places Pentheus within a series of tales revolving around Thebes; so, too, an informed viewer in the House of the Vettii room would encounter and explain Pentheus as at the center of three Theban events.
Figure 8.11
Io and Argus. MANN 9557, from Room 37, the House of the Citharist, Pompeii (I.4.5), ca. 60–79 ce.
Our final exploration of viewpoints in mythological painting is in a small room in the House of the Citharist (I.4.5), right across the peristyle from the reception room featuring the panel of Bacchus discovering Ariadne discussed above. The only fully preserved panel from the room, now in the Naples Museum, is a composition in two parts (Fig. 8.11). At the apex of a pyramid, a woman sits on a rock; a cow lies directly below her on the vertical axis, head cocked at the same angle. Forming the horizontal axis are the extended arms of two males: a seated shepherd on the left locks gazes with a standing nude male, who is handing him a pan-pipe. The two axes represent two tales of metamorphosis. The woman is the nymph Io. Jupiter has seduced her in a dark cloud and has been found out by his jealous wife Juno. To protect Io from Juno’s wrath, Jupiter transforms her into a cow. Ever suspicious, Juno places a herdsman named Argus, a creature with a hundred eyes—here depicted as a simple shepherd—to guard over the captive cow.40 Io, painfully aware of her bovine form, suffers greatly, and, seeing her, Jupiter orders Mercury to kill Argus. The swift-footed god disguises himself as a shepherd (but here is frontally nude as a sign of his divinity). As Mercury entrances Argus with the sounds of the pan-pipe, he proceeds to relate the origin story of the instrument at such mind-numbing length that he bores the watchman to sleep. The god will then quickly behead Argus and release Io.
In this portrayal, Mercury is telling his tale, signaled by the syrinx placed at the very center of the picture, the pivot in the story. Any viewer familiar with the Metamorphoses will note right away that the scene corresponds closely to Book 1, lines 689–779. Ovid is the first known author to embed the tale of Syrinx, another metamorphosis, within the episode of Io, telling how the nymph, chased by Pan, was helped by her sisters to elude him and changed into reeds. Forlorn, Pan bound the reeds together, and voilà, the pan-pipe was born. Argus is listening. The instant he nods off, Mercury will act, and the external narrator, namely Ovid, will take over and finish the tale himself.41
We enjoy a privileged view and witness the coexistence of “true” and “false” identities. Io appears trapped behind the origin tale, her fate in suspense. She is speechless. (In Ovid’s telling she is only able to low.) Io’s lifted veil and exposed breast display her beauty and vulnerability, and her wide-eyed gaze—directed out of the picture toward us—captures the incongruity between her external appearance as a cow and her human psychological state. (One could even see Io’s expression as a “thought-cloud” of the cow below.) We observe that Argus’s perception is limited; he seems unaware of Io the woman, and just guards Io the cow. We, in contrast, see Io in both her true and transformed guises. To Argus, Mercury is a simple shepherd; we behold a glorious deity. We witness a fake herdsman (Mercury) talking to a real herdsman (Argus) guarding a fake cow (Io). It is a humorous scene about disguise and deceit that invites knowledgeable responses. An educated viewer could unravel—perhaps out loud for the benefit of companions, and at some length—not just the metamorphosis of the nymph Syrinx (thus assuming Mercury’s and Ovid’s voices), but also tell Io’s story from different points of view, thinking ahead to when Juno will transform her back into human form, in which case the seated Io would appear in her true guise. Time is elastic. By embedding an internal narrator—and one-third of the Metamorphoses features such—Ovid puts us outside the current story and in another time and place. The viewer of the painting can add more narrative voices, opening the story outward into flashbacks and foreshadowings, or looking inward to the tale-within-the-tale of the syrinx.
The Io panel once appeared in a small room opening onto a peristyle that probably was used for leisure and entertaining. Within a decorative scheme of yellow, red, and black, three square pictures, one on each wall, depicted a mortal and an immortal in a landscape (Fig. 8.12).42 When the house was excavated, the picture with the Io scenes was the only intact panel and was quickly removed, while just the lower parts of those on the east and south walls survived. Luckily, these fragmentary scenes were recorded in drawings and now can be identified through comparisons with better-preserved frescoes from other houses in Pompeii. For example, on the east wall, the moon goddess Selene descends from the sky toward a hunter, a sleeping Endymion. On the south, back wall, Venus holds the wounded young hunter Adonis, who rests in her lap.43
Figure 8.12
Top: Reconstruction of Room 37, the House of the Citharist (I.4.5), ca. 60–79 ce. James Stanton-Abbott. Left: Selene and Endymion. In situ, Room F, House of Ara Massima, Pompeii. (VI.16.15); bottom: Venus and Adonis. In situ, Room 18, House of the Colored Capitals, Pompeii (VII.4.31); right: Io and Argus (cf. Fig. 8.11).
The stories of the two goddesses, both besotted with beautiful, androgynous youths, offered a compelling contrast: while the moon goddess Selene’s nocturnal visits recur in an endless cycle as Endymion remains her eternal lover, even if in a deathlike slumber, there is an impending finality to Adonis expiring in Venus’s arms. The two tales were paired in poetry from the Hellenistic period onward, and in the 2nd century ce the Greek satirist Lucian wrote a comical dialogue in which the goddesses commiserate with each other and compare their experiences. Venus addresses Selene directly, describing the way the moon goddess appears when she flies above, gazing at, and then descending upon, Endymion:
Venus: What is this I hear about you, Selene? When your car is over Karia, you stop it to gaze at Endymion sleeping hunter-fashion in the open; sometimes, they tell me, you actually get out and go down to him.Selene: Ah, Venus, ask that son of yours [namely Eros, love]; it is he must answer for it all.Venus: Well now, what a naughty boy! … But tell me, is Endymion handsome? That is always a comfort in our humiliation.… to which Selene responds, describing a vision that perfectly matches the painting.Selene: Most handsome, I think, my dear; you should see him when he has spread out his cloak on the rock and is asleep; his javelins in his left hand just slipping from his grasp, the right arm bent upwards, providing a bright frame to his face, and he breathing softly in helpless slumber. Then I come noiselessly down, treading on tiptoe not to wake and startle him—but there, you know all about it; why tell you the rest? I am dying of love, that is all.44
The two panels on adjoining walls, like the goddesses in Lucian’s tale, engage in a visual dialogue with each other, and a living spectator can chime in. The goddesses gaze at the nubile bodies of their beloved mortals, who are turned outward, towards us, so that we see what Venus and Selene see; while they are engaged in looking, we also can survey the goddesses’ partially exposed bodies.
The three compositions illustrate how juxtapositions add new dimensions to each story. As if choreographed, the mortals—Endymion, Adonis, and Io—all sit or recline in three-quarter view with legs extended toward the viewer’s left. It is tempting to imagine this space as occupied by two or three people lying on couches in the very same position, legs extended to the left, just below the mythical figures. Looking up, the diners would see that the highest figures in the panels are female—Selene, Venus, Io (a third goddess, if one thinks ahead to Io’s subsequent apotheosis in Egypt)—but the eye inevitably returns to the foreground and to the delicate mortals Adonis and Endymion, whose pale, youthful bodies contrast with the tanned, powerful god Mercury. The panel with Io is the outlier in this triad. While the goddesses lust after male mortals, Io, having been ravaged and transformed by a male god, is at the mercy of negotiations between another male god, Mercury, and Argus, a male watchman, who is working in the service of a female goddess, Juno. The power hierarchy is clear: goddesses like Selene, Venus, and Juno suffer emotionally over the fate of mortals and are weaker and more fragile than the virile male divinities. In a room like this, the longer one looks, the more threads connecting the tales untangle and new ones can be woven.45
2 Conclusion
We believe what we see every day. Many people think that perception is the simple act of opening our eyes and observing what is out there. Roman texts and images deny any such belief. The pictures I have discussed demonstrate that vision is far from a simple cognitive act. In fact, these examples celebrate its extraordinary complexity. Many characters within these portrayals cannot see and thus, do not know: Ariadne (asleep), Agamemnon (self-blinded to Iphigenia’s sacrifice and unexpected rescue), Agave (manic hallucination). Others may see, but still do not know: Europa and Leda (naïve to Jupiter’s disguise), Argus (a watchman with a hundred eyes, yet unable to keep them open and hence blind to a metamorphosis), Penelope not (yet) recognizing her missing husband. Some see, but are helpless to speak or act (Actaeon, Io, Selene, Venus). For others, seeing is an assault and a transgression (Actaeon, Pentheus). Sometimes it is only action that allows one to see: who within the throng around Achilles (in addition to Deidameia) knows the hero’s true identity before the horn blast? Ulysses and Diomedes do not see him for who he is until he moves. Finally, and most importantly, those without physical sight know all: Calchas (foresight).
In effect, these mythological paintings are as much about perception as about the tales themselves. Intensified by the reactions of internal onlookers, they widen the scope of vision and raise questions about the power and limits of physical sight, about seeing and knowing, perception and cognition, sight and insight. We learn that the eye is unreliable and easily fooled by appearances, inviting danger, and that, because recognition is fallible, so too is the knowledge that it reveals.46
To return to our initial question, what happens when three or four scenes, each filled with multiple viewers, surround a living spectator? Posing frontally, looking or gesturing in our direction, some of those viewers directly engage with us. The living spectator (ancient or modern) becomes immersed in concurrent, intersecting reactions and in the process animates the stories in real time. The viewer’s role fluctuates. Sometimes we identify a god’s disguise (bull, swan, cow), but at other times we are as unsure as the other characters within the picture (Amphitryon or Jupiter?). When heroes and mortals through their own powers of vision become enlightened or make a transition, we possess a clairvoyance as if we were gods and seers, looking ahead to an epiphany and a rescue (Iphigenia) or recollecting a back story that points to the future (Achilles’ shield). We experience panoramas and insights that our mortal eyes are not equipped to see.
The painted rooms of Pompeii and other Roman sites were not picture galleries, but spaces of daily life. It may be difficult for most modern homeowners to imagine, but many of the mythological scenes remained on the walls of houses for generations, some as long as a century. Over such a time span, individual responses must have been infinite. Rather than being merely isolated images, such paintings created an interactive environment that involved the viewer in the room. The key to this engagement was the ability with which painters brought their figures to life, in different states of consciousness, an artistic narrative skill that goes far beyond storytelling.
The panel remains in situ on the north wall of the Macellum: Barringer 1994. On recognition in the Odyssey, see Murnaghan 1987; Cave 1988, 22–24, 250–255; Mueller 2016.
Anagnorisis was defined by Aristotle as a change from ignorance to knowledge, revealing either a close relationship or enmity (Poetics 11.1452a30–32); Cave 1988, 10–54; Kennedy and Lawrence 2009, 1–5.
The bibliography on theories of haptic vision, intromission and extromission is enormous. For the purpose of this essay, see Bartsch 2006, 57–103 on optics and the eye of the lover. The study of Roman visuality has experienced a boom in recent decades, although the gap between ancient and modern ways of seeing is rarely taken into account. Notable studies of Campanian painting include Frederik 2002 on the erotic gaze; Elsner 2007, 67–109 on parallels in ecphrasis and painting; Squire 2016; Platt and Squire 2017. A different approach has been taken by Clarke 1998, 2003, and 2007, who challenges the notion of a generic Roman Viewer constructed from fragmentary texts of elite male writers and considers a range of viewers, including slaves, freedmen, women, old, young, straight, and gay. The present essay focuses on one aspect of viewing in narrative scenes, namely the shifting viewpoints and levels of awareness of depicted figures.
On the House of Jason, see Bergmann 1996. The frescoes from the House of the Five Skeletons are now badly faded, but are recorded in drawings: PPM 4, 1039–1040. The encounter between Ulysses and Penelope corresponds closely to that in the Macellum, although Eurycleia stands directly across from Penelope rather than peering over a wall. The scene of Paris and Helen reverses the order of the panel in the House of Jason; between them Eros now reads a rotulus, perhaps narrating what will come. The third panel in the room represented another prominent woman in the Trojan war, Cassandra.
Note the following abbreviations used in this chapter:
MANN = Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli.
PPM = Baldassarre, I., ed. 1990–2003. Pompei, Pitture e Mosaici. 10 vols. Rome.
On schemata, see Settis 1984, 210–211; Catoni 2005. On the importance of formulaic body types for recognition: Pearson 2015; Elsner and Squire 2016, 192; Bergmann 2017. Gutzwiller 2004 gives an excellent account of how both text and image can convey the inner thoughts of a character through postures and gestures.
On the shared vocabulary among media, see the cogent statement by Dunbabin 2014, 234. Lada-Richards 2004, 2013 makes a strong case for a reciprocal influence of figural gestures and postures among the Metamorphoses, pantomime dancing, and the visual arts; similarly, Franzoni 2006 stresses that schemata should not be understood as crystallized formulae but as fluid and changeable. Theatrical intertextuality was not new in the Roman period: Lamari 2018, 185 discusses how in Greek tragedy allusions to static images served as “ ‘hyperlinks’ connecting a performance with mental images ‘stored’ in the audience’s visual memory,” thereby adding depth to the perception of the play.
For a recent summary of scholarship on the visual combinations in Pompeian rooms, with a case-study on the schema of the amorous couple, see Lorenz 2018; also Lorenz 2014, on rhetorical aspects of pictorial ensembles in the House of Menander.
Lorenz 2018, 56 rightly warns against seeking direct, one-to-one correspondences between Ovid and Pompeian paintings. An example of a reductive analysis is Knox 2004. The only concrete example of a direct connection between a Pompeian painting and Ovid is a quotation from the Heroides inscribed onto a scene of Phaedra, but it was added independently after the painting was completed; Swetnam-Burland 2015. A thorough investigation of correspondences between the Metamorphoses and Roman art is the long-term project led by Francesca Ghedini and Isabella Colpo at the University of Padua, “MarS: Mito Arte Società nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio”; among the many resulting publications, see Colpo 2008, 2010; Colpo and Ghedini 2012; and the culminating exhibition “Ovidio: amori, miti, e altre storie,” Farinella et al. 2018. It should be stressed that one can find many parallels between the paintings and other texts besides Ovid’s; notable are the epylliac “snapshots” that similarly mark a turning point, shift temporal levels, embed stories delivered by characters, incorporate analeptic and proleptic devices, and are open to alternative endings; Sistakou 2009.
A unique exception that captures, in single images, the continuous narrative of each book of the Metamorphoses, is the series of engravings from an 18th-century edition: von Albrecht 2014.
Hardie 2002, 173–174. See also the comment by Rosati 2002, 274–275: “the text invites us to consider the plurality of narrative levels and the different involvement and interests of the actors who participate in the narrative transaction … the text also shows us how the same story can be narrated in completely different ways (for example, by changes in the times and rhythms of the narration, narrating voice, and point of view)”; also Rosati 1983, 129–152 on a “poetics of spectacularity.” On changing narrative voices within the text, see Wheeler 1999, 185–193, 207–210; Barchiesi 2001, 49–78; 2002, 180–199. For an introduction to Ovid’s use of the visual arts in the Metamorphoses, see Solodow 1988, 203–231; Feldherr 2010.
On spectators in Roman painting: Michel 1982; Sharrock 2002; Elsner 2007, 88–91; Lorenz 2007; onlookers in painting in general: Fricke and Krass 2015.
MANN 111475.
On Europa as a naïve viewer in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, unable to see through the verisimilitude of Jupiter’s disguise despite the bull’s supernatural gentleness, Feldherr 2010, 253–257, especially 255: “she is so absorbed by the real presence of the bull that she misses the real presence in the bull” (NB miratur 2.858). Note that the bull here is brown and not the gleaming white emphasized by Ovid, but it does have relatively small horns (Met. 2.852–859); Anderson 1996, 335.
This room in the House of Jason featured three tranquil, idyllic outdoor scenes against a luminous white ground, each with an animal (bull, horse, goat) or a hybrid (Pan, centaur): Europa on the central, east wall; Hercules, Deinaneira, and Nessus on the north; a musical contest between Pan and a nymph on the south: Zevi 1964; PPM 9, 1999, 700–707. In contrast to such quiet scenes of Europa on the shore portrayed in the Third Style (Hodske 2007, 200), the more numerous Fourth Style paintings of the second half of the 1st century depict Jupiter racing across the sea; Hodske 2007, 200–202.
MANN 9286. The panel was recently cleaned, restored, and published in color; Sampaolo and Hoffmann 2014, 164–165.
Hodske 2007, 159–162; Lorenz 2008, 111–120 counts seventeen examples, all painted in the Fourth Style, most depicting Ariadne from the front. Among the numerous studies of Ariadne paintings: Fredrick 2002, Elsner 2007; Colpo 2011. In the House of the Citharist, the panel was featured in a large reception room along with two others; one is lost, but the panel from the central wall depicts Iphigenia at Aulis, on the point of recognizing Orestes and Pylades. Both panels showcase nude bodies (in one case female, in the other male), both depict an imminent rescue, and both show a moment full of expectation, with characters still in the act of looking; however, the pictures show more differences than similarities: the Bacchic scene is dynamic and full of excitement while that of Iphigenia is psychologically tense; Bergmann 2014, 72–74.
Sharrock 2002, 260–261 sees in this scene the recurring scheme of “powerless, looked-at women, powerful ‘looking’ men, and still more powerful goddesses”; Iphigenia is eroticized by the association of the virgin sacrifice with sex.
MANN 9112; on the House of the Tragic Poet (VI, 8, 5), see Bergmann 1994. Another representation of this sacrifice in Pompeii (VI.5.1–2), now destroyed but preserved in a watercolor, shows Calchas cutting Iphigenia’s hair and, on the right, Agamemnon sitting, veiled, and turned away; Hodske 2007, 258.
Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium 8.11, Ext. 6, trans. Shackleton-Bailey. Similar accounts of the figures’ mounting emotions in Cicero Orator 74 and Quintilian IO 2.13.11–13. For a thorough discussion, see Platt 2014, 224–231.
MANN 116085, from the House of Achilles or Domus Uboni (IX.5.2). There appear to be damage and repairs in the area of the clasping arms, but Ulysses’s grip is clear in a close variation from the House of the Dioscuri (VI.9.6), MANN 9110.
At Ov. Met. 13.165–170, Ulysses takes credit for discovering Achilles:
arma ego femineis animum motura virilem
mercibus inserui, neque adhuc proiecerat heros
virgineos habitus, cum parmam hastamque tenenti
‘nate dea,’ dixi ‘tibi se peritura reservant
Pergama! quid dubitas ingentem evertere Troiam?’
iniecique manum fortemque ad fortia misi.
I was the one who hid, in the women’s trinkets,
arms that would rouse a warrior. As he stood there,
still in his dresses, and reached out his hand
toward shield and spear, I told him: ‘Son of Thetis,
Troy, doomed, is waiting for you: why delay her?’
It was my hand that sent a brave man forward
to his brave deeds. (trans. Humphries 2018, 311).
On the distinction between how other humans and heroes perceive time and achieve self-awareness, see Sistakou 2009. At Iliad 9.410–416, Achilles must choose between a long, unexceptional life and an early death with glory; Trimble 2002, 230–235 notes that the episode was especially popular among 1st-century ce authors, the fullest accounts being Ov. Met. 13.162–171 and Stat. Achil. 1; Ovid refers to Homer’s narrative at Ars 1.681.
Among the eleven Pompeian representations of Achilles on Scyros, all are dated to the later 1st century ce; two others are close in composition to this one, but all were located in very different settings. This panel in the small room of the House of Achilles (IX.5.2) was combined with two others from the life of Achilles: Thetis in Vulcan’s shop and Thetis with the Arms of Achilles. In the House of the Dioscuri (VI.9.6–7), it occurred in the tablinum across from a scene of an enraged Achilles drawing his dagger against Agamemnon and Minerva urging the hero to restrain himself. The very same pairing appears as wall mosaics on a garden wall in the House of Apollo (VI.7.23). On the variations, see Brilliant 1982, 67–69; Trimble 2002; Lorenz 2008, 212–215; Heslin 2015, 144–151, 161–165 sees a connection with the lost frescoes in the portico of the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii.
Scenes of Chiron’s teaching Achilles lyre playing are first attested in the 1st century bce but examples increase in the next century. The first literary example: Ars 1.11; Pliny NH 35.134.5–7 suggests that the decoration of the shield (also represented in a painting from the Herculaneum Basilica) may cite a lost painting by Athenion of Maroneia. See Gury 1986, 446–447; Smith 1997, 78–83.
On the room, see Seiler 1992, 56–57, 104–109, 113–114; Bergmann 2017, 254–255. Lorenz 2008, 207–210 lists sixteen representations of Actaeon in the Third and Fourth Styles.
In painting this gesture is frequent in scenes of Pan who, uncovering what appears to be a sleeping nymph, instead finds a hermaphrodite; repulsed, he turns his face away and registers his shock with a raised hand, fingers spread wide. A hunter’s cynegetic vision, inductive like that of a prophet, is able to make out key details on the margins of perception; similarly, recognition scenes require sighting signs or clues: Cave 1988, 242–253.
“Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine narres, sit poteris narrare, licet!” (trans. Humphries 2018, 62).
The horns are now difficult to make out but are clearly visible in an early photograph: PPM 5, 1994, 839 Fig. 223. On Actaeon’s continued humanity in his post-metamorphic state see Sharrock and Ursini, respectively, in chapters 10 and 12 of this volume.
Other frescoes of the Actaeon story depict Diana as the famous Crouching Aphrodite type; Bergmann 1999, 85–90. On naked Aphrodites, see Smith 1991, 79–82; on the hermaphrodite and ancient debates about back-versus-front views of the female body and male-versus-female anatomy, id. 134; Stähli 2001; on the Venus Pudica type, see Stewart 1997, 97–107; for a feminist reading of the Cnidian Aphrodite’s pose as normative in the iconography of women, Sharrock 273–275; on the problems of the “male gaze” in ancient viewing of the Venus statue, see Squire 2011, 88–109, and 103–109 (on Actaeon); on how the immobilization of the female body as a statue helps legitimize male erotic viewing under the guise of art, Segal 1998, 18–22; on nakedness in Augustan poetry and art, see Griffin 1986, 104–111.
The new subject of Venus fishing, introduced in the Fourth Style, appears in twelve examples: Lorenz 2008, 199–201.
This, however, is not a given: in Ovid’s account Agave does not reach awareness of what she has done, and this fresco also leaves the outcome open.
Anderson 1996, 407 on lines 710–713; 408–409 on the attack.
Sharrock 2002, 282–283 sees Pentheus as a “problematized” male image, in which “powerful” dressed (or semi-dressed) women surround the helpless and naked son.
Ovid connected their stories: Pentheus pleads for mercy from his aunt Autonoe, begging her to remember the fate of her son, Actaeon; but in her madness she has no idea what he is talking about and tears off his right arm, while another aunt, Ino, tears off his left (Met. 3.719–722). Segal 1998, 35 notes the symmetry of Pentheus’ aunts, the sisters of Agave (NB matertera, “a mother’s sister,” 719), tearing off his right and left arms; like Actaeon earlier in the book, Pentheus no longer has the arms he needs. Both victims experience the loss of body and speech.
Wirth 1983; Brilliant 1984, 73–76, 78–80.
Wheeler 2000, 69. Similar examples in Greek tragedy are cited by Lamari 2018, 187–188: “From early in the fifth century, sinister creatures such as the maenads or Lyssa, disguised gods, and the lethal delirium of delusive parents all find their way into Greek iconography, but also into the minds of Euripides’ spectators.”
It is common in pictorial room ensembles for a third panel to offer a contrast to the other two, such as the tranquil scene of Venus fishing next to the active interactions of Diana and Leda in the House of the Gilded Cupids.
An early literary parallel to this scene is a portrayal of Theocritus’ “Little Heracles,” Idyll 24.55, which “freezes” the moment when Hercules grasps the snakes by the neck, forming a tableau and retarding the action by shifting perspective to the reactions of the mortal parents and the household in a “psychological perception of time”; Sistakou 2009, 308–309.
Cancik 1967, 213; Fondermann 2008, 143–144 n. 103.
MANN 9557, dated in the 60s ce; Bergmann 2014, 79–81; Sampaolo and Hoffmann 2014, 168–169. Note that here, as in the fresco of Europa, the cow is brown and not snow white as described by Ovid (Met. 1.610–612). The painter probably chose to represent Argus as a shepherd to harmonize with the other two scenes in the room. On such variations in frescoes: Lorenz 2008, 229–230; Ghedini 2011. A similar panel of Io remains in situ on the west wall of the Macellum in Pompeii (VII.9.4) as a pendant to that of Ulysses and Penelope: Barringer 1994, 150.1–2, Pl. 96.1.
On the Io episode in Ovid, see Feldherr 2010, 15–26.
Until recently the House of the Citharist was little known because the excavations of the 1860s were not well documented and much was lost; Sampaolo and Hoffmann, 2014.
On the 19th-century drawings of the Endymion and Adonis panels, De Vos 1990, 128–131. The closest surviving scene of Endymion is in the House of Ara Massima (VI.16.15) and that of Adonis, in the House of the Colored Capitals (VII 4.32.51). In order to create a harmonious triptych, the muralists added two seated foreground figures to the Endymion panel, a shepherd on the left foreground to match Argus in the Io panel and at the right, a water nymph with a hydria to correspond to the Mercury. Lorenz 2008, 216–218 counts sixteen examples of Selene and Endymion on Pompeian walls; three scenes of Venus and Adonis, id. 176–180. On visual memory and the schema of the reclining male nude used for Endymion and Adonis, Pearson 2015; Elsner and Squire 2016, 193–203.
Adapted from Lucian, Dialogue of the Gods 11, trans. Fowler, Oxford 1905; for an earlier version: Theocritus, Idyll 3.47–50.
Bartsch 2006 on optics and erotic viewing in the 1st century ce. Barchiesi 2002, 187 on Venus addressing Adonis (Met. 10.578–579). Successful exploits of both male god and poet are invoked by Ovid in Am. 1.3, where Ovid promises to make his mistress famous as earlier poets had done to Io, Leda, and Europa, certainly not a reassuring list of exempla.
Cave 1988; Kennedy and Lawrence 2009, 2–3, on recognition scenes as a problem moment that creates uncertainty about knowledge itself. On the instability of seeing and knowing in the Metamorphoses (in the light of his portrayal of Pythagoras), see Fondermann 2008, 133–156; on the vulnerability of mortal sight and speech, Feldherr 2010, 244.
Works Cited
Albrecht, M. von. 2014. Ovids Metamorphosen: Texte, Themen, Illustrationen. Heidelberg.
Anderson, W.S. 1996. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Books 1–5. Edited with introduction and commentary. Norman.
Baldassarre, I., ed. 1990–2003. Pompei, Pitture e Mosaici. 10 vols. Rome.
Barchiesi, A. 2001. Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets. Trans. M. Fox and S. Marchesi. London.
Barchiesi, A. 2002. “Narrative Technique and Narratology in the Metamorphoses.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. P. Hardie. Cambridge: 180–199.
Barringer, J. 1994. “The Mythological Paintings in the Macellum at Pompeii.” CA 13: 149–166.
Bartsch, S. 2006. The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. Chicago.
Bergmann, B. 1994. “The Roman House as Memory Theater: The House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii.” Reconstructions by Victoria I. Art Bulletin 76: 225–256.
Bergmann, B. 1996. “The Pregnant Moment: Tragic Wives in the Roman Interior.” In Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece and Italy, ed. N. Kampen. Cambridge: 199–218.
Bergmann, B. 1999. “Rhythms of Recognition. Mythological Encounters in Roman Landscape Painting.” In Im Spiegel des Mythos. Bilderwelt und Lebenswelt, ed. F. de Angelis and S. Muth. Wiesbaden: 81–107.
Bergmann, B. 2014. “Bild und Betrachter: Das Bildprogramm der Casa del Citarista.” In Pompeji: Götter, Mythen, Menschen, ed. V. Sampaolo and A. Hoffmann. Bucerius Kunst Forum, exhibition catalogue. Hamburg: 74–85.
Bergmann, B. 2017. “The Lineup: Passion, Transgression, and Mythical Women in Roman Painting.” Eugesta 7: 199–246. https://eugesta-revue.univ-lille3.fr/eng/issues/issue–7–2017/
Bergmann, B. 2017. “At Face Value: Painted Ladies on Pompeian Walls.” In Roman Artists, Patrons and Public Consumption: Familiar Works Reconsidered, ed. E. Perry and B. Longfellow. Ann Arbor: 142–165.
Brilliant, R. 1984. Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art. New York.
Cancik, H. 1967. “Spiegel der Erkenntnis: Zu Ovid, Met. III 339–510.” Der altsprachliche Unterricht 1: 42–63.
Catoni, M.L. 2005. Schemata: Comunicazione non verbale nella Grecia antica. Pisa.
Cave, T. 1988. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford.
Clarke, J. 1998. Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100B.C.– A.D.250. Berkeley.
Clarke, J. 2003. Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-elite Viewers in Italy, 100B.C.–A.D. 315. Berkeley.
Clarke, J. 2007. Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100B.C.–A.D. 250. Berkeley.
Colpo, I. 2008. “‘Ambienti Ovidiani’ nelle case vesuviane? Riflessioni preliminare.” Eidola: International Journal of Classical Art History 5: 65–81.
Colpo, I. 2011. “Tutte le Arianne di Ovidio.” Eidola 8: 65–77.
Colpo, I. and F. Ghedini, eds. 2012. Il Gran Poema delle Passioni e delle Meraviglie: Ovidio e il repertorio e figurativo fra antico e riscoperta dell’antico (Atti del convegno, Padova 15–17 settembre 2011). Antenor 28. Padua.
Colpo, I. and M. Salvadori. 2010. “Ovidio e la pittura della prima età imperiale.” In Atti X Congresso AIPMA (Napoli, 17–21 Settembre 2007), ed. I. Bragantini. AION: Annali di archeologica e storia antica 18. Napoli: 277–288.
Elsner, J. 2007. Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text. Princeton.
Elsner, J. and M. Squire. 2016. “Sight and Memory: The Visual Art of Roman Mnemonics.” In Sight and the Ancient Senses, ed. M. Squire. New York: 180–204.
Farinella, V., F. Ghedini, G. Salvo, and F. Toniolo, eds. 2018. Ovidio: Amori, miti, e altre storie. Rome.
Feldherr, A. 2010. Playing Gods. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton.
Fondermann, P. 2008. Kino im Kopf: Zur Visualisierung des Mythos in den “Metamorphosen” Ovids. Göttingen.
Franzoni, C. 2016. “A proposito di schemata: Comunicazione non verbale nella Grecia antica di M. Luisa Catoni.” Quaderni storici 3: 671–702.
Fredrick, D. 2002. The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power and the Body. Baltimore.
Fricke, B. and U. Krass, eds. 2015. The Public in the Picture: Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine and Western Medieval and Renaissance Art = Das Publikum im Bild: Beiträge aus der Kunst der Antike, des Islam, aus Byzanz und dem Westen. Zurich.
Ghedini, F. 2011. “Ovidio sommo pittore? Le Metamorfosi tra testo e immagini.” In Tra testo e imagine: Riflessioni ovidiane, Giornata di Studi (Padova, 24 maggio 2010). Eidola: International Journal of Classical Art History8: 179–197.
Ghedini, F. 2012. “Io, Argo, Ermes e la Zampogna.” In Colpo and Ghedini, eds. 2012: 93–110. Padova.
Griffin, J. 1986. Latin Poets and Roman Life. Chapel Hill.
Gury, F. 1986. “La Forge du Destin.” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Antiquité 98: 427–489. https://www.persee.fr/doc/mefr_0223–5102_1986_num_98_2_1512 accessed 4/30/2017.
Gutzwiller, K. 2004. “Seeing Thought: Timomachus’ Medea and Ecphrastic Epigram.” AJP 125: 339–386.
Hardie, P. 2002. Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge.
Heslin, P. 2015. The Museum of Augustus: The Temple of Apollo in Pompeii, the Portico of Philippus in Rome, and Latin Poetry. Los Angeles.
Hodske, J. 2007. Mythologische Bildtheme in den Häusern Pompejis: Die Bedeutung der zentralen Mythenbildern für die Bewohner Pompejis. Ruhpolding.
Humphries, R., trans. 2018. Ovid, Metamorphoses. Annotated by J.D. Reed. Bloomington.
Kampakoglou, A. and A. Novokhatko, eds. 2018. Gaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature. Berlin.
Kennedy, P. and M. Lawrence, eds. 2009. Recognition: The Poetics of Narrative. Interdisciplinary Studies on Anagnorisis. New York.
Knox, P.E. 2004. “Ovidian Myths on Pompeian Walls.” In A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. J. F Miller and C.E. Newlands. Chichester: 36–54.
Lada-Richards I. 2003. “‘Mobile Statuary’: Refractions of Pantomime Dancing from Callistratus to Emma Hamilton and Andrew Ducrow.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 10: 3–37.
Lada-Richards I. 2004. “Μύθων Εἰκών: Pantomime Dancing and the Figurative Arts in Imperial and Late Antiquity Authors.” Arion 12: 17–46.
Lada-Richards I. 2013. “Mutata corpora: Ovid’s Changing Forms and the Metamorphic Bodies of Pantomime Dancing.” TAPA 143: 105–152.
Lamari, A. 2018. “Visual Intertextuality in Ancient Greek Drama: Euripides’ Bacchae and the Use of the Art Media.” In Gaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature, ed. A. Kampakoglou and A. Novokhatko. Berlin: 187–204.
Lorenz, K. 2007. “The Ear of the Beholder: Spectator Figures and Narrative Structure in Pompeian Painting.” Art History 30: 665–682.
Lorenz, K. 2008. Bilder Machen Räume: Mythenbilder in pompejanischen Häuser. Berlin.
Lorenz, K. 2014. “The Casa del Menandro in Pompeii: Rhetoric and the Topology of Roman Wall Painting.” In Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture, ed. J. Elsner and M. Meyer. New York: 183–210.
Lorenz, K. 2018. “Distributed Narrative: A Very Short History of Juxtaposing Myths on Pompeian Walls.” In Wandering Myths: Transcultural Uses of Myth in the Ancient World, ed. L. Audley-Miller and B. Dignas. Berlin: 143–167.
Lorenz, K. 2018. “Ovid und die pompejanische Wandmalerei: Zweckehe oder Wahlverwandschaft?” In Ovid. Amor fou: Zwischen Leidenschaft und Lächerlichkeit, ed. D. Roberts and J. Griesbach. Munich: 56–61.
Lucas, D.W., ed. 1968. Aristotle, Poetics: Introduction, Commentary, and Appendices. Oxford.
Michel, D. 1982. “Zuschauerfiguren in der pompejanischen Wandmalerei.” In La regione sotterratta dal Vesuvio: Studi e Prospettive (Atti del Convegno Internationale, 11–15 November 1979, Naples), ed. A. De Franciscis. Naples: 537–573.
Mueller, M. 2016. “Recognition and the Forgotten Senses in the Odyssey.” Helios 43: 1–21.
Murnaghan, S. 1987. Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey. Princeton.
MANN = Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli.
PPM = Baldassarre, I., ed. 1990–2003. Pompei, Pitture e Mosaici. 10 vols. Rome.
Pearson, S. 2015. “Bodies of Meaning: Figural Repetition in Pompeian Painting.” In Beyond Iconography: Material, Methods, and Meaning in Ancient Surface Decoration, ed. S. Lepinksi and S. McFadden. Boston: 149–166.
Platt, V. 2014. “Agamemnon’s Grief: On the Limits of Expression in Roman Rhetoric and Painting.” In Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture, ed. J. Elsner and M. Meyer. Cambridge: 211–231.
Platt, V. and M. Squire, eds. 2017. The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History. New York.
Rosati, G. 1983. Narciso e Pigmalione: Illusione e spettacolo nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio. Florence.
Rosati, G. 2002. “Narrative Techniques and Structures in the Metamorphoses.” In Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. B.W. Boyd. Leiden: 271–304.
Sampaolo, V. and A. Hoffmann, 2014. Pompeji: Götter, Mythen, Menschen: Eine Ausstellung des Bucerius Kunst Forums mit Werken aus dem Archäologischen Nationalmuseum Neapel. Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, 27. September 2014 bis 11. Januar 2015. Munich.
Segal, C.P. 1998. “Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the Metamorphoses.” Arion 5: 9–41.
Seiler, F. 1992. “Casa degli Amorini dorati (VI 16, 7, 38).” Häuser in Pompeji 5. Munich: 46–47.
Settis, S. 1984. “Images of Meditation, Uncertainty and Repentance in Ancient Art.” History and Anthropology 1: 193–237.
Sharrock, A.R. 2002. “Looking at Looking: Can You Resist a Reading?” In The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power and the Body, ed. D. Fredrick. Baltimore: 265–295.
Sitsakou, E. 2009. “‘Snapshots’ of Myth: The Notion of Time in Hellenistic Epyllion.” In Narratology and Interpretation:
Τ he Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature, ed. J. Grenthein and A. Rengakos. Berlin: 293–319.Smith, R.A. 1997. Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Vergil. Ann Arbor.
Smith, R.R.R. 1991. Hellenistic Sculpture. London.
Solodow, J. 1988. The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Chapel Hill.
Squire, M. 2011. The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy. Oxford.
Squire, M. ed. 2016. Sight and the Ancient Senses. New York.
Stähli, A. 2001. “Der Hintern in der Antike.” In Körperteile: Eine kulturelle Anatomie, ed. C. Benthien and C. Wulf. Reinbek: 254–274.
Stewart, A. 1997. Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece. Cambridge.
Swetnam-Burland, M. 2015. “Encountering Ovid’s Phaedra in House V.2.10–11, Pompeii.” AJA 119: 217–232.
Trimble, J. 2002. “Greek Myth, Gender, and Social Structure in a Roman House: Two Paintings of Achilles at Pompeii.” In The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity. Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome suppl. 1, ed. E.K. Gazda. Ann Arbor: 225–248.
de Vos, M. 1990. “Casa della Citarista.” In Pompeii: Pitture e mosaici, ed. G. Pugliese Caratelli and I. Baldassare. Rome. 1: 117–184.
Wheeler, S.M. 1999. A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philadelphia.
Wheeler, S.M. 2000. Narrative Dynamics in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Tübingen.
Wirth, T. 1983. “Zum Bildprogramm in der Casa dei Vettii.” Römische Mitteilungen 90: 449–455.
Zevi, F. 1964. “La Casa Reg. IX.5, 18–21 a Pompeii e le sue pitture.” Studi miscellanei 5. Rome.