Pompeian Yard Art
This article was written for Suite 101's Tacky Yard Art event, but it isn't really about tacky art. I am never too comfortable when making fun of bad taste; I prefer mocking good taste. This article is about art in the most tasteful gardens of Pompeii and Herculaneum, two cities south of Naples which were destroyed in 79 CE. I doubt if anyone would find the art in these gardens tacky, but some of you may be surprised by what cultured Romans displayed in their gardens.
Pompeii and Herculaneum had originally been Greek cities; this part of Italy was conquered by the Samnites near the end of fifth century BC. The Romans only conquered this region in 80 BC; Pompeii and Herculaneum were really only Roman cities for a century. In doing research for this article, I have discovered that even though the gardens of Pompeii are always called Roman, the term is a bit inaccurate. Alexander the Great conquered much of what the ancient Greeks knew as "the world". Soon after Alexander's death in 323 BC, his generals divided up the conquered territories into several kingdoms. These kingdoms shared a culture which we call Hellenistic. The main cultural centers of the Hellenistic world were Alexandria in Egypt, Pergamon in Asia Minor and the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea. Athens became a center for conservative culture, a place were people went to absorb the culture of the past. During the period when Pompeii was a living city, the Samnites were totally a part of the Hellenistic world and Rome was in the process of absorbing Hellenistic culture. The homes and gardens of Pompeii are really Southern Italian Hellenistic with a strong Roman influence.
In Pompeii, the homes of the wealthy were usually backed by a peristyle which surrounded an ornamental garden. The one image that virtually every Roman garden contained was a statue of Priapus. These were usually crude images made of wood, so very few statues of Priapus have survived; most of his surviving images are painted on walls. Priapus was the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite. He promoted fertility in crops, cattle and women; the first fruits of fields and gardens were sacrificed to him. It is difficult for people who were brought up with Judeo-Christian ideas to understand the religions of Imperial Rome, but it is important to remember that the images of gods and nature spirits were not just decorations; they were religious images. Images which Christians would call erotic or pornographic were fertility images; the insurance of of fertility played a central role in many ancient religions. The phallic windchimes which hung from trees and peristyles in Roman gardens may seem obscene to us, but the ancient Romans didn't see them that way. The Romans believed that both the phallus and the bells gave protection from evil spirits, so phallic windchimes made perfect sense. They had no qualms about displaying them in their gardens.
Latest Articles