When Roman landscape painting was discovered in the late 18th century, it entered a well-established tradition of genre painting and landscape architecture that was then about two centuries old. Its interpretation from the 19th century to today has in general sought to merge it with existing and on-going theories of painted landscape representation, as well as with developments in landscape construction and the tempering of nature with architectural elements in the way of “views of” and “views toward.” In this elegant book, Mantha Zarmakoupi revises the assimilation of Roman landscape painting and its architectural corollaries to the norms of Western values and proposes a different approach in six briskly argued chapters.[1]
In chapter 1, Zarmakoupi brings her discussion of landscape and its representation away from art historians’ toolkit of style and iconography to center it in the larger picture of how landscape and its architectural modulation were part of a Roman Anthropocene, an ecology of change in the long two centuries of the late Republic and early Empire, from the end of the third Punic war to the early empire (c.150 BCE-50 CE). A valuable review of recent interpretive scholarship on Roman landscape painting (pp. 11-17) is strikingly contrasted with the development of Rome itself: over time, the city developed an internal landscape of horti, villas, parks, and imperial domains that re-naturalized natural elements inside the urban environment (Fig. 3 and pp. 27-38 in Chapter 2). This timely reminder that Roman power, architecture, and Roman landscape art must be seen in a continuum leads Zarmakoupi to develop an ecocritical template to analyze landscape in Roman art and architecture, by which she means how the art-nature relationship is a product of changes in nature by human action and intentions rather than any merely aesthetic appreciation. The language she chooses is the useful idea of artialization——the process by which nature is translated into both art and the built environment, as developed by Alain Roger[2]—which then can be assimilated to an ecology of human intervention on nature for historical investigation. A brief discussion of physis, natura, and (capitalized and uncapitalized) nature/Nature in Hellenistic writing (Polybius, Posidonius) and in Vitruvius (pp. 22-25) precedes Zarmakoupi’s ambitious goal of “framing of painted and actual landscapes…[moving] between perceptual and conceptual space” [beyond] traditional notions of pictoriality.”
It’s at the end of chapter 1 and in chapter 2 that the author qualifies her ambition by outlining the necessarily circumscribed nature of the evidence: this is perforce a study of elite motivations in elite environments—grand urban projects (e.g. Porticus of Pompey in Rome) and coastal villas of southern Latium (Fig. 22 and pp. 39-45) and Campania (Bay of Naples). Fair enough: elite history is as much history as any other, and the strategies of more general socio-material histories at ordinary levels are different.[3] Zarmakoupi gives a short account of how the development of opus caementicium, new means of securing indoor running water in villas, and new tree species enabled fundamentally new ways of modifying nature to live in luxurious circumstances in rure while also engaging, for maritime villas, in productive pisciculture for sale in urban markets: profit from production (fructus) and luxurious living (luxuria) were not incompatible.[4]
Chapter 3 is about architectural luxuria: design with nature in and viewed from the framing architecture of elite villas. This is a topic on which Zarmakoupi has extensively and thoughtfully written. A quick tour d’horizon of various interpretive means about these villas (pp. 47-48) precedes a discussion of the climatic orientation of rooms as defined in theory by Vitruvius and applied in practice by Pliny the Younger to his own villas. The mediating devices of (columnar) porticus and cryptoporticus as devices of protection (from heat, sun, and intemperate weather or seaside location) and circulation (of air and people) are analyzed in detail through several buildings (Villa A at Oplontis, Villa San Marco and Villa Arianna at Stabiae, Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, Villa of the Papyri) and with the builders’ and owners’ intentions of “mediation and regulation” of inside and outside views and warm and cool internal environments (pp. 48-68).
Roman domus and villas were painted environments; they were also places to eat festively, suspend disbelief, and enjoy pictures and decorations. These experiences could be conveyed pictorially in small painted pictures (pinakes) displayed at eye-level as well as in fictive environmental painting such as the cool, partially underground triclinium at the villa of Livia at Prima Porta (pp. 68-71). Zarmakoupi’s analysis of both—framed images and simulacra—introduces chapter 4 on miniature landscapes in Roman painting. Aspects of such painting had existed in Latin accounts of them (Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder), but their components have inspired various modern interpretations (pp. 77-79). The assemblage of elements in pastoral, shoreside, and watery environments is shown in relation to real villas enclosing little ports or picturesque harbor views (Villa del Capo di Sorrento, Villa of Tiberius at Sperlonga). Paintings of harbors, either evocatively ruinous ones or busily active scenes (the most famous is that from Gragnano, fig. 62) are interpreted as views from villas, with villas dominating what was in their lines of sight and thereby enhancing the patronal gaze.
Domination is a theme of chapter 5: visual domination over space in the form of painted simulacra with perspectival effects and plantings (both painted images and horticultural). Zarmakoupi deploys a wide-ranging number of examples, from monuments that were ornamentally planted (South Agora at Aphrodisias, Sanctuary of Juno at Gabii, and others) and painted environments that incorporated exotica, references as much to the Hellenistic past as to Egyptian references. Roman architects and artists used such exotica to evoke the spaces of recent Roman conquests with notes of foreign strangeness, a kind of Roman Orientalism no less potent in the Late Republic and early empire than Orientalism was for European artists, writers, and audiences in the 19th century.[5]
In chapter 6, the many seemingly disparate elements of her study are brought together in a sturdy architecture of how nature and its representation came together in Roman architectural and pictorial art. The theoretical approaches are reviewed in relation to their relevance to Roman situations (pp. 125-29). There was a politics to landscape: in the face of landscapes undergoing real change, painted views in different styles acted as mediations and rearranged (“remediated”) versions of landscapes’ elements. This made formal perspectival images in sharp focus and fuzzy or “impressionistic” images compatible with one another, not as a matter of style but as a matter of aesthetic experience in movement. The examples the author chooses to illustrate her thesis are picturing and framing effects of architecture, lighting effects, and reconstructions of garden designs in Villa A at Oplontis, Porticus 3 of the Villa San Marco at Stabiae, and other examples of juxtaposed views in “paratactic” succession. This enchanting rhetoric of painted and real views was reserved for the gaze of owners and their guests: in Villa A at Oplontis, spaces frequented by enslaved personnel and servants had plainer surfaces or different painted walls, and views outward and into the patronal areas were carefully occluded (pp. 128-51).[6] This social differentiation gives an unexpected social dimension to landscape painting and Roman painting in general.
Zarmakoupi’s book is wide-ranging in its coverage of Roman literary, social, and aesthetic topics, and it may seem to be addressed mainly to specialists in the fields of Roman painting and domestic architecture. However, its appeal does not stop there: it is a valuable resource for teaching and for students because Zarmakoupi is generous in outlining the historiography and sources for landscape painting and theory of natural representation—Roman, Renaissance, and European to the present. Painters painting the countryside in grand countryside houses for people of privilege, like J.M.W. Turner painting for Lord Egremont at Petworth, was as much a Roman as a later activity.
Notes
[1] The book itself is also exceptionally elegant: the Getty Foundation Publications team has made its fine production- and illustration-values equal to its contents.
[2] Roger, Alain 1997. Court traité du paysage. Paris: Gallimard. It is welcome that Zarmakoupi uses Roger’s idea as a framework only and does not insist on its universal application to all aspects of Roman landscape painting. The verb artialiser is unusual in French: it appears mainly in 19th century art criticism or as extensions of Alain Roger’s ideas.
[3] For insights into non-elite Roman art, scholars of daily life have for a long time as well as more recently been at the forefront of documentation of non-elite contexts: Carcopino, Jérôme 1975 (1939). La vie quotidienne à Rome à l’apogée de l’Empire. Paris: Hachette; English translations: id. 1956, Daily life in ancient Rome: the people and the city at the height of the empire. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin; id. 2003. Daily life in ancient Rome: the people and the city at the height of the empire, 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale U. P.; Veyne, Paul 1985. De l’Empire romain à l’an mil, vol. 1 of Ariès, Philippe and Georges Duby (eds.) 1985-1987. Histoire de la vie privée, 5 vols. Paris: Seuil ; English translations: id. (eds.) 1987-1991, A History of Private Life. More recently, Clarke, John R. 2005. Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans. Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.-A.D. 315. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; on this topic, some articles in MacMullen, Ramsay 2019. Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. P., ACLS Humanities E-Book.
[4] Marzano, A. 2010. “Le ville marittime dell’Italia romana tra amoenitas e fructus.” Amoenitas 1: 21-34.
[5] For the aesthetic and post-colonialist history of “oriental” imagery in Western visual and literary art: Edward W. Saïd 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
[6] Zarmakoupi’s analysis of the difference between the patronal and enslaved visual experiences is based in part on the insights in Joshel, Sandra R. and Lauren Hackworth Petersen 2019. “Seeing Slaves at Villa A.” In Clarke, John R. and Nayla K. Muntasser (eds.) 2014. Oplontis: Villa A (‘of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy, vol. 2 The Decorations: Painting, Stucco, Pavements, Sculptures. E-book, para. 582-634. New York: American Council of Learned Societies.