Viewing, Desiring, Believing: confronting the divine in a Pompeian house

Abstract

Why did I see the thing? Why did I make my eyes guilty? Why, thoughtlessly, did I harbour knowledge of wrongdoing? Actaeon unwittingly beheld the naked Diana . . . 1 (Ovid, Tristia II.103±5)The pleasures of voyeurism are vicariously experienced in a broad range of contexts in Roman art. One thinks of the observers painted within mythological tableaux in the frescoes of Campania, or the frisson created for the viewer of the Warren Cup by the boy's head peering round a door in the background. 2 The voyeur within the image reflects the external viewer, so drawing one into the scene there depicted, yet simultaneously emphasizing our distance from and superiority to the thing beheld. We have the power to accept or reject the invitation; to view voyeuristically is to feel that one has a certain control over what is seen. 3 However, as Ovid warns us in my epigraph, to view is not always to be a safely objective observer; sometimes, the object which one views can look back, and, caught in the act of observing, the viewer's vicarious position is undermined: we are actively implicated in the events which we behold. Actaeon's fate is not only a result of the fact that he saw what he should not have seen, but that Diana beheld him in the act of viewing. And, as Ovid insinuates with a hint of selfdramatization, myth and reality can mirror each other in disturbing ways. 4 As Bartsch's study of theatricality in the age of Nero has demonstrated, the relationship between performer and audience was often subverted in Imperial Roman society, to the extent that`the categories of spectacle and spectator lose all stability.' 5 In such a culture, the gaze holds both power and danger for him who beholds, and him who is beheld. The meeting of gazes can be an occasion fraught with anxiety about the confrontation of Self and Other and the potential for the onset of desire, shame, violence and the loss of autonomy. 6 In this paper I will explore the way in which the complexities of the gaze are explored by a series of 4th Style mythological paintings in Pompeii II.2.2-5 (called variously the House of Octavius Quartio, or Loreius Tiburtinus). 7 Here, issues of desire related to the power of naturalistic art are provocatively intertwined with religious iconography and the dimension of the symbolic in a manner which challenges and problematizes the viewer's response to the images with which he is

Writ in Water: Seeing Time in Ovid’s Narcissus Episode*

“…The entire article well explores the significance of Dionysiac viewing in Pompeian houses, treating Dionysiac imagery as transformative rather than merely decorative. Platt's (2002) interpretation of the visual program in this house focuses rather on the figure of Isis.…”

Spatial Dimensions in Roman Wall Painting and the Interplay of Enclosing and Enclosed Space: A New Perspective on Second Style

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“…43-45). See (Platt 2002 , pp. 104-7), for comments on the statuette's three-dimensionality in relation to the house's two-dimensional painted images.…”

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