Snippets of Life: The Curated Assemblage in Roman Wall Painting

Lopez, Odette

Item

Snippets of Life: The Curated Assemblage in Roman Wall Painting

Lopez, Odette

Abstract

Despite being a relatively understudied category of Roman wall painting, images of food, animals, and inanimate objects – known for the past century as ancient still life – functioned as holistic representations of Roman life and culture. The term “still life” does not fully acknowledge, however, the fluidity and complexity of the ancient genre. Essentially, these paintings were much more than decorative ‘fillers’ within painted ensembles. By depicting personalized, carefully curated groupings of everyday objects that were emblematic of different vital associations, they managed to serve as communicative vehicles for delivering meaning through display. This thesis, hence, proposes ‘Curated Assemblage’ as a more effective term for these paintings, and aims to delimit their compositional form within the context of Roman wall-painting. It also explores the ways in which the paintings within this genre acted as vibrant visual statements with inherent agency for both spaces and viewers. With a new definition therefore, that recognizes these representations as carefully chosen objects that were both important to the patron and emblematic of Roman life, this corpus also expands to include compositions that have otherwise been overlooked in modern scholarship. Thus, new curated “object groupings” may be recognized as belonging to this class, for the first time. They include fruits and birds that were visually “plucked” from their natural garden surroundings, chosen for their particular species and assembled on a shelf unframed, to be called herein, “Floating Shelves.” They also include fruits and birds that have been purposefully chosen to be carefully constructed in garden scenes and woven into garlands. This paper will show that it is the purposeful gathering of these items that allow them all to be included in the genre of the Curated Assemblage.