This engraving is based upon a drawing by Sir William Gell and was published in his book Pompeiana in 1832. It shows how Gell believed the atrium in Pompeii's House of the Tragic Poet might have looked in 79 CE. At the bottom of the picture is a shallow pool for collecting rainwater, called an impluvium. The large shaft of light is coming from a rectangular opening known as a compluvium, which was always located directly over an impluvium. The earliest such atriums probably date from the third century BCE. Earlier atriums in Pompeii lacked impluviums and were probably completely roofed over. According to The Classical Oxford Dictionary, copyright 1996, an atrium was "originally the site of the family hearth, whose smoke caused the blackening (ater) which gave the place its name".
Beyond the atrium is the home's tablinum. Tablinums were originally the master bedroom and later housed the shrine of the Penates and served as a repository for important family documents, funeral masks of ancestors and important heirlooms. Many scholars think that they also functioned as reception rooms.
Beyond the tablinum you can see the columns which surrounded the sunny peristyle garden. In this particular house there is such a large opening between the tablinum and the peristyle garden that there is very little separation between the two areas; atrium, tablinum and peristyle all flow together. This wasn't characteristic of all Pompeian homes, but even before peristyle gardens began to be created it was normal for a tablinum to have a large a large window which looked out onto a walled garden.
It was normal for a tablinum to have shutters, or at least curtains, between the tablinum and the peristyle which could be closed to give the tablinum some protection during inclement weather. There were also usually curtains which could be drawn to separate the tablinum from the atrium, but on a pleasant day the house of the Tragic Poet probably looked as open as it does in Gell's reconstruction.
The House of the Tragic Poet's atrium is an example of what Vitruvius called a Tuscan Atrium, because the opening in the roof is supported by heavy beams and crossbeams. Later atriums often featured four columns at each corner of the impluvium, Vitruvius called them tetrastyle atriums; Pompeii's House of the Silver Wedding has a good example of one.
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