Hansen, IngeCorrado, CrispinBecker, Emily2024-06-132024-06-132022Becker, Emily. "Curating Nature: The Experience of Artifice and Environment in Roman Luxury Villas". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2022.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/132Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Fall 2022.Between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, the Roman luxury villa gained architectural expression and a new interest in the pleasure garden as a “space.” These spaces were marked by their luxurious elements, including fruiting trees, marble statuary, and bubbling fountains. Traditionally, scholarship has analyzed these components individually, as parts that form an implicitly static setting for the social interaction of the elite. However, the formulation of the luxury villa is also characterized by experimentation; hence, by examining the form of the pleasure garden in elite villas spaces, the intersections between painted and real gardens, as well as the viewer experience in the garden, this thesis will argue that the garden is simultaneously a spatial environment and a work of art. It will thus adopt a holistic ‘total site’ approach to the pleasure garden and its villa context as a way to understand the implications of the garden within the visual landscape of the villa. I suggest the term curation to recognize this fabrication as intentional, and to embed the garden with greater meaning and agency than previously appreciated. The result is an assemblage, composed of multiple layers of entangled object–human networks. These function together to form not only the social role of the garden, but also the garden experience in Roman villa culture. This thesis employs a novel interpretive framework: at the core of this methodology is an analysis of climatic and archaeological data, as well as contemporary theories related to spatial interpellation, semiotics, objecthood, and museum studies. The aim is for a reframing of the agency of the garden space within the entangled visual assemblages and constructed experiences that characterize the early Imperial luxury villa.102 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Domestic architectureClassical antiquitiesRoman architectureBuildingsRome (Empire)DwellingsThesis