In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in nature and mythical landscape. They have proved to be useful conceptual categories towards a more complete understanding of the dynamics that operate between literature and visual art in classical antiquity. Notably, a special museum exhibition on the subject was held in Milan and Naples.[1] Paesaggi del drama—a study based on Benedetta Sciaramenti’s doctoral dissertation carried out at Università degli Studi di Perugia—investigates the diverse conceptions, definitions, and visual contexts of landscape painting in Roman culture. From the start, Sciaramenti acknowledges the elusiveness of the category of ‘landscape’ both ontologically and semantically (p. ix). Her approach is based on the scholarly opinion that Ovid’s literature influenced the selection of subjects for wall painting from the Second to the Third Style, in which mythic characters develop and suffer in natural environments. In her aim of presenting the reader with the salient role of the landscape in these paintings, Sciaramenti has produced a remarkable book.
The book is divided into five chapters that fall broadly into two sections. In the first section (Chapters I–III), Sciaramenti highlights the theoretical and technical aspects of artistic landscapes as described in the literature and their visual representations as seen in Antiquity. The second section (Chapters IV–V) is more interpretive and discusses the relation between Ovidian literature and landscape as depicted in Roman art. In the introductory chapter (Chapter I), Sciaramenti outlines the methodology and the rationales adopted in her research. The study, she acknowledges, is possible thanks to the existence of a ‘notion’ of landscape. A fundamental aspect of her analysis is a consideration of the collective subjectivity and aesthetic values that conceive landscape painting within a particular socio-historical dynamic of the Romans understanding of it and of ours.
Questions of theory and praxis in Roman art are the subject of Chapter II. In a stimulating discussion of past and current notions of landscape in both the literary and visual sources, Sciaramenti analyses the ‘art’ of creating it. Ancient notions of mimesis in art are discussed with particular attention to what the author identifies as a ‘Greek cultural resistance to open representations of landscape in art’ (p. 12), as opposed to the Romans. She then analyzes the ekphrasis of landscapes by Cicero, Propertius, and Statius, including Pliny’s recounting of the physical settings of the pictorial landscape and its pleasing effects on the viewer (pp. 39–43).
In the first part of Chapter III, the author addresses the issue of idyllic landscape as the representation of an ideal or sacral-idyllic space as recounted by Homer, Horace, Virgil, and Propertius and pictorially preserved in art. The second part examines the opposite idea: ‘il drama senza idillio’. This occurs when drama takes place in nature and strips the landscape of its idyllic articulation (pp. 61–70), an idea taken from Isabella Colpo’s typology of images inserted in architectonic frames.[2] Next, the author moves on to examine the convergence between dramatic landscape and ‘horrid nature’ (locus horridus), both required to stage the manifestation of the supernatural and the victims’ punishment. The combinations of these concepts in visual form are evidence of the uniqueness of Roman mythological landscapes; a type of pictorial representation that also takes into consideration the viewer’s aesthetic experience.
The discussion in Chapter IV focuses upon the nature of mythical landscape as described in the Odyssey and in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, where the author acknowledges some disparities between text and image. Her assessment of the scene of Odysseus in the Land of the Laestrigonians would have been complete had she considered two key studies on this very subject, which were left out of her discussion.[3] As an alternative, she advocates the presence of a new sensibility for natural environments obtained from the Hellenic idea of nature and the Roman taste for optical illusions, a combination that leaves the mythical stories in the background. According to the author, lingering in technical or narrative sources to make sense of this particular Odyssey painting may be important to us, but these aspects were not a determining factor to the commissioner and the painter (p. 79). The final section of this chapter is devoted to the landscapes in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, resulting in compositions where viewing and decorating lean towards the spectacular. Drawing on C. Segal’s ‘iconographic lemmas’ where signs and symbols help to condense the narrative into a set of visual elements, Sciaramenti discusses the elements of nature as part of a shared ‘habitat’ where humans and gods coexist, such as the forest, the cave, and water, often combined. These habitats have different levels of meaning, including what the author describes as ‘estetica dell’horridus’, present in some Ovidian passages (Met. 1.416–433, 510, 571, 574–575; 4.294) where drama is closely connected to a particular type of landscape, providing the scenario for a diversity of similar stories.[4]
In the final chapter, Sciaramenti situates Ovid’s texts more specifically among examples of mythological paintings in the Third and Fourth Styles, where landscape is no longer idyllic and ahistorical. Instead, it is a feature that brings meaning to tragic myths, particularly on those that show narrationes continuae. Some landscape elements include putres trunci that symbolize the tragic sense of a story: sterile in the case of Icarus (Met. 8.231); the withered tree, instrument of torment, in that of Marsyas (Met. 6.383–400).[5] Rocks, on the other hand, represent the absence or cancellation of the idyllic landscape, creating the scenario where ‘error’ becomes ‘horror’ (p. 135). The author’s analysis is particularly interesting regarding Dirce’s representation on the fresco from the House of Iulius Polybius (Pompeii, Reg. IX 13, 1.3). Here, Sciaramenti notes that the underlying theme of Dirce’s punishment is not the restitution of the moral order through violence, but rather the violence inflected over the female body. The balanced proportion and chromatism that reunites natural, anthropogenic, and mythological elements in the landscape serve to highlight the victim’s twofold representation (pp. 149–154). By contrast, in another version of the subject (Herculaneum IV 1/2), a clear and barren landscape silently witnesses the brutality of Dirce’s perpetrators, thus actively adding to the dramatism of the scene. This ‘semantic autonomy’ of the landscape serves the author as a prompt to the chapter’s final discussion: the role of the seascape in the representations of Polyphemus and Galatea (Met. 13. 740–897), and of Perseus and Andromeda (Met. 4. 663–752). Both mythical pairs are usually juxtaposed in the same room, united by the theme of troublesome love.[6] A high point in the discussion is Sciaramenti’s emphasis on the non-narrative function of these pictorial scenes in opposition to Blanckenhangen’s, who sees them as illogical compositions.[7] The author advocates, convincingly, that both background scenes were rationally selected to stress the pathos of the main depiction (pp. 163–164). For example, the element of conflict is always placed to the left of the character on the rocky elevation. This element is used as a pictorial choice to isolate the main figure in a kind of imprisonment (either illusory or an actual one), which can only be broken by the intervention of others. The chapter closes with reflections on the landscapes described in the literary sources and the extent to which the paintings are informed by them. Here, special attention is paid to Polyphemus’ pastoral activity and alienated life (Od. 11; Theocr. Id. 11), to which Ovid adds elements such as “prominet in pontum cuneatus acumine longo / collis utrumque latus circumfluit aequoris unda” (Met. 13. 778–779), and the giant’s trailing flocks, all aspects frequently observed in the iconography of the paintings under discussion. The author surveys the duality of cultural, aesthetic, and emotional oppositions, which are synthetized in the juxtaposition of land and sea in proximity but, at the same time, despairingly apart. In contrast, depictions of Perseus and Andromeda relied on a long-established visual tradition reconfigured by the Roman culture of the time; hence the disparity between the literary sources and some paintings depicting the subject.[8]
In her conclusion, Sciaramenti states that mythical landscapes became the true recipients of human pain and tragedy. They are, in fact, an active element in the mythological action as they provide a locus for different types of metamorphoses as well as a dissolutive power over the victims, who often end up ‘merging’ with the landscape in the form of animals or natural elements. Although Sciaramenti is well aware of the limitations of the comparative method used in her study, she succeeds in advancing our understanding of some common places in the cultural imagery of Augustan times, and how the Romans defined themselves in relation to nature. Overall, the author successfully demonstrates that a reconstruction of ‘landscape’ as a distinctive Roman subject is not only possible, but also functional to the ‘sensibilità paesaggistica’ in modern culture.
The book includes twenty-nine plates with high-quality colour and black and white photographs of Roman landscape paintings, sometimes accompanied by useful drawing reconstructions and iconographic comparisons with other media. A comprehensive bibliography is to be found at the end (pp. 185–203). Chronological and stylistic discrepancies are discussed in extensive explanatory footnotes, where Sciaramenti often (perhaps too often) acknowledges the scholars whose work informs her research. It would have been informative to have some of these in the text; for example, a more extensive revision of E.W. Leach’s reverse effect than that adopted by most scholars, including Sciaramenti; that is, the extent to which Roman painting—including landscape painting—could have had an impact on contemporary literary styles. Without going beyond the existing evidence, Paesaggi del dramma is a stimulating contribution to scholarship on the subject of Roman landscape painting and it certainly will be welcome by graduate students and scholars in the fields of Classics and Classical archaeology and art. The book’s conclusions may well encourage us to keep reconsidering the sources we have.
Notes
[1] Mito e Natura. Dalla Grecia a Pompei. Milan, Palazzo Reale (July 31, 2015 – January 10, 2016); Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale Pompei Scavi (March – October 2016). See exhibition catalogue under the same title by G. Sena Chiesa and A. Pontrandolfo (eds.), 2015. Milan: Electa.
[2] I. Colpo 2010, Ruinae…et putres robore trunci. Paesaggi di rovine e rovine nel paesaggio nella pittura romana (I sec. a.C.–I sec. d.C.), Antenor Quaderni 17. Rome: Quasar.
[3] S. Lowenstam 1995. ‘The Sources of the Odyssey Landscapes’, Echos du Monde Classique 39: 193–226; J.P. Small 2003, The Parallel Worlds of Classical Art and Text. Cambridge University Press, pp. 98–100. (I do not, however, fully agree with the idea that texts and artworks were in separate worlds; instead, they co-existed in permanent interaction. See O. Taplin 2007, Pots & Plays. Interactions between Tragedy and Greek vase-painting of the Fourth Century B.C. LA: Getty, Part I, esp. 22–26).
[4] C.P. Segal 1969, Landscape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A study in the transformation of a literary symbol. Wiesbaden, pp. 39–49.
[5] On the Italic resonances of the motif, see A. Weis 1982, ‘The motif of Adligatus and Tree: a study on the sources of Pre-Roman iconography’, AJA 86(1): 21–38.
[6] Some examples discussed by the author include the paintings from Agrippa’s Villa in Boscotrecase (Room 19), House of the Sacerdos Amandus (Pompeii, Reg. I 7,7), House of the Sailor (Pompeii, Reg. VII 15, 2).
[7] A. Blanckenhangen and C. Alexander 1990, The Augustan Villa at Boscotrecase. Mainz am Rhein, p. 33ss.
[8] This topic is brilliantly discussed by G. L. Grassigli in ‘Magica arma (Ov. Met. 5 197). Il volto e il riflesso di Medusa tra letteratura e arti figurative a Roma’, in F. Ghedini and I. Colpo (eds.), Il gran poema delle passioni e delle mareviglie. Ovidio e il repertorio letterario e figurativo fra antico e riscoperta dell’antico (Antenor Quaderni 28). Padova, 2012, pp. 73-83.