This study explores Roman luxury villa lifestyle and architecture to shed light on the villas' design as a dynamic process related to cultural, social, and environmental factors. Through an analysis of five villas from around the bay of Naples, it shows how the Romans developed a sophisticated interplay between architecture and landscape.
This volume offers a comprehensive survey of Roman villas in Italy and the Mediterranean provinces of the Roman Empire, from their origins to the collapse of the Empire. The architecture of villas could be humble or grand, and sometimes luxurious. Villas were most often farms where wine, olive oil, cereals, and manufactured goods, among other products, were produced. They were also venues for hospitality, conversation, and thinking on pagan, and ultimately Christian, themes. Villas spread as the Empire grew. Like towns and cities, they became the means of power and assimilation, just as infrastructure, such as aqueducts and bridges, was transforming the Mediterranean into a Roman sea. The distinctive Roman/Italian villa type was transferred to the provinces, resulting in Mediterranean-wide culture of rural dwelling and work that further unified the Empire.
This book demonstrates how the Romans constructed garden boundaries specifically in order to open up or undermine the division between a number of oppositions, such as inside/outside, sacred/profane, art/nature, and real/imagined. Using case studies from across literature and material and visual culture, Victoria Austen explores the perception of individual garden sites in response to their limits, and showcases how the Romans delighted in playing with concepts of boundedness and separation. Transculturally, the garden is understood as a marked-off and cultivated space. Distinct from their surroundings, gardens are material and symbolic spaces that constitute both universal and culturally specific ways of accommodating the natural world and expressing human attitudes and values. Although we define these spaces explicitly through the notions of separation and division, in many cases we are unable to make sense of the most basic distinction between 'garden' and 'not-garden'. In response to this ambiguity, Austen interrogates the notion of the 'boundary' as an essential characteristic of the Roman garden.
The archaeological investigation and the architectural survey conducted at Villa Arianna at Stabiae between 2010 and 2019 form the core of this book. The author's motivation to start on a large-scale study began with the wall constructions, paintings, and mosaics that have gradually been uncovered over the years. His book offers an in-depth comprehension of the history, the decorations, and the construction dynamics of the building from its foundation as country villa to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. For the first time it provides a synthesis of the archaeological evidence, the ancient texts and the journals of the Bourbon age excavations. The first part of the book is divided into four narrative chapters, which unearth essential environmental and historical-archaeological information. The second part consists of three chapters and the conclusion. They evaluate the results of the recent excavations and the evidence obtained from the study of the archaeological findings. The book offers a rare diachronic and synchronic biography of this unique villa. It offers students, scholars, and enthusiasts alike profound first-hand insights into Roman archaeology and one of its material manifestations, the Roman villa.
Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.
Across the Roman Empire, ubiquitous archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence attests to the significance of bathing for Romans' routines and relationships. Public baths were popularly viewed as necessities of daily life and important social venues. Given the importance of bathing to the Roman style of living, by endowing eight magnificent baths (the so-called imperial thermae) in the city of Rome between 25 BCE - 315 CE, imperial patrons greatly enhanced their popular and political stature. Decoration and Display in Rome's Imperial Thermae presents a detailed analysis of the extensive decoration of the best preserved of these bathing complexes, the Baths of Caracalla (inaugurated 216 CE). Maryl B. Gensheimer takes an interdisciplinary approach to existing archaeological data, textual and visual sources, and anthropological theories in order to generate a new understanding of the visual experience of the Baths of Caracalla and show how the decoration played a critical role in advancing imperial agendas. This reassessment of one of the most ambitious and sophisticated examples of large-scale architectural patronage in Classical antiquity examines the specific mechanisms through which an imperial patron could use architectural decoration to emphasize his own unique sociopolitical position relative to the thousands of people who enjoyed his benefaction. The case studies addressed herein--ranging from architectural to freestanding sculpture and mosaic--demonstrate that sponsoring monumental baths was hardly an act of altruism. Rather, even while they provided recreation for elite and sub-altern Romans alike, such buildings were concerned primarily with dynastic legitimacy and imperial largess. Decorative programs articulated these themes by consistently drawing analogies between the subjects of the decoration and the emperor who had paid for it. The unified decorative program--and the messages of imperial power therein--adroitly honored the emperor and consolidated his reputation.
A Companion to Roman Architecture presents a comprehensive review of the critical issues and approaches that have transformed scholarly understanding in recent decades in one easy-to-reference volume. Offers a cross-disciplinary approach to Roman architecture, spanning technology, history, art, politics, and archaeology Brings together contributions by leading scholars in architectural history An essential guide to recent scholarship, covering new archaeological discoveries, lesser known buildings, new technologies and space and construction Includes extensive, up-to-date bibliography and glossary of key Roman architectural terms
For the Romans, much of life was seen, expressed and experienced as a form of theatre. In their homes, patrons performed the lead, with a supporting cast of residents and visitors. This sumptuously illustrated book, the result of extensive interdisciplinary research, is the first to investigate, describe and show how ancient Roman houses and villas, in their décor, spaces, activities and function, could constitute highly-theatricalised environments, indeed, a sort of 'living theatre'. Their layout, purpose and use reflected and informed a culture in which theatre was both a major medium of entertainment and communication and an art form drawing upon myths exploring the core values and beliefs of society. For elite Romans, their homes, as veritable stage-sets, served as visible and tangible expressions of their owners' prestige, importance and achievements. The Roman home was a carefully crafted realm in which patrons displayed themselves, while 'stage-managing' the behaviour and responses of visitor-spectators.
A groundbreaking ecocritical study that examines how ideas about the natural and built environment informed architectural and decorative trends of the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Landscape emerged as a significant theme in the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Writers described landscape in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with architectural and decorative trends. This illustrated volume examines how representations of real and depicted landscapes, and the merging of both in visual space, contributed to the creation of novel languages of art and architecture. Drawing on a diverse body of archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence, this study applies an ecocritical lens that moves beyond the limits of traditional iconography. Chapters consider, for example, how garden designs and paintings appropriated the cultures and ecosystems brought under Roman control and the ways miniature landscape paintings chronicled the transformation of the Italian shoreline with colonnaded villas, pointing to the changing relationship of humans with nature. Making a timely and original contribution to current discourses on ecology and art and architectural history, Shaping Roman Landscape reveals how Roman ideas of landscape, and the decorative strategies at imperial domus and villa complexes that gave these ideas shape, were richly embedded with meanings of nature, culture, and labor.