The Development of Panoramic Sensibilities in Art, Literature, Architecture and Gardens in the Villas of Rome in the Late Republic and Early Empire: The Perspective from Stabiae

Abstract

The Borderless World of the Late Hellenistic Mediterranean Elite 1 The immense proliferation of Roman luxury villas (villae maritimae) around the Bay of Naples seems to have accelerated rapidly after the Social War of 91-89 B.C. and Pompeius' suppression of piracy in 74 B.C., so much that by the time Strabo was writing in about 9 B.C. the area was… "…strewn, in part with these cities… and in part with residences and plantations which, following in unbroken succession, present the aspect of a single city". (Strab., 5.4.8) The process of increasing the luxury of townhouses in Rome (domus) and villas in the Bay of Naples, accelerated in the last decades of the Republic and coincided with the most ferocious senatorial political competition 2 , and villas and outward signs of Greek culture were new tools of political competition. "In 78 B.C. there was no finer house in Rome than that of Lepidus, but only thirty five years later it was not even in hundredth place" (Plin., NH, 36.109). But after about 30 B.C., at the end of the Civil Wars, to about A.D. 60-with the virtual end of senatorial political competition-another development takes place: the Roman elite and their artists and architects created a unified multi-media environment in their villas which unifies painting, poetry, architecture, and garden design to views of nature. Why? Villas acquire outward facing panoramic colonnades with Greco-Roman monumental "orders, " façades are punctuated by pavilions with symmetrical façade units hieratically dominated by the center (i.e., the "B-A-B" motif common to Renaissance and Baroque architecture), they abandon the Durchblick straight passage from entrance to atrium for surprising transitions between spaces (including gardens), each with independent cross-axial multiple framed views. This occurs at the same time as the dreamlike spindly architectural fantasies of the Pompeian Third Style and picturesque architectural landscape vignettes of seaside villas are invented, and poets such as Virgil and Ovid introduce Latin bucolic or pastoral poetry. 1 The author expresses great gratitude for being invited to present these ideas in this conference, and warm thanks for the special efforts to show participants the fabulous wonders of this great capital city and the region.