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Temporality on the Roman Wall: A Re-evaluation and Virtual Reconstruction of Cubiculum 19 in the Villa at Boscotrecase

Weber, Paige Eileen
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Abstract
The Roman villa at Boscotrecase was built along the slopes of Mount Vesuvius in the late 1st century BCE and buried during the infamous eruption of 79 CE. Accidentally discovered in 1903, the villa was then partially excavated over the course of three years before Vesuvius erupted again in 1906 and destroyed what remained of the structure. Due to this untimely event, art historical scholarship on the fresco paintings yielded by the villa has been frustrated by the fragmentary state of its archaeological documentation. Nowhere is this more limitational than in cubiculum 19, a small room from which two central panels depicting mythological landscapes were extracted from the east and west walls. Reframed and hung against a white backdrop for display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the paintings have since been divorced completely from the spatial context of the cubiculum for which they were commissioned as well as the holistic decorative scheme of its murals which survive only in conjectured two-dimensional illustration. Yet these panels hold a unique position among the extant corpus of Roman wall paintings. Together they constitute the earliest examples of a pictorial narrative method that conflates disparate moments of time, communicated through the repetition of protagonists within a single spatial setting and visual field. On the east wall of the cubiculum, the hero Perseus rescued Andromeda and met with her father in a conjoined scene; on the west wall, Polyphemus serenaded the nymph Galatea and hurled a boulder towards the retreating ship of Odysseus in a juxtaposed episode. Classified by scholars as strict continuous narrative, this storytelling strategy introduced a new mode of conceptualizing time on the domestic Roman wall. Taking the novelty of this temporal expression as its point of departure, this thesis offers a re-assessment of cubiculum 19 by investigating issues of time. Time as it was artistically manipulated on the walls is examined through narratological analyses of the mythological panels based on structuralist-formalist approaches. A three-dimensional virtual reconstruction of the villa — which restores the paintings to a simulation of their original architectural and decorative context for the first time — is later applied in discussion of the temporal-perceptual rhythms of viewing within the cubiculum. Together these research paradigms seek to synthesize notions of time as it was viewed on the walls of the room and experienced by an embodied viewer within the enclosed space.
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Thesis (B.A. in Art History)--John Cabot University, Fall 2023.
Date
2023
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Domestic architecture, Roman architecture, Boscotrecase (Italy)
Citation
Weber, Paige Eileen. "Temporality on the Roman Wall: A Re-evaluation and Virtual Reconstruction of Cubiculum 19 in the Villa at Boscotrecase". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2023.
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