ABSTRACT
Some of the finest examples of Roman domestic architecture that persist in modern times have been found beneath the volcanic debris of the Vesuvian eruption of the year AD 79. Entombed by natural disaster, a segment of first century AD Roman culture has been remarkably preserved in its embodied form, and in a manner which has the potential to provide an enhanced insight into the Roman understanding of the human situation. The extant remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in particular, exhibit not only an architectural articulation of space, as understood in our modern sense, but also a degree of pictorial articulation which confounds any attempts at categorization in terms of genre or style that has become the norm in art historical circles. Indeed, the four well-known Pompeian styles of wall painting are just such an attempt at classification which serves to lead the spectator towards preconceptions imposed upon, rather than revealed within, those works. To talk of architecture and to talk of painting in separation is currently a common misdemeanour, and one which is wholly inappropriate in the context of the discussion of symbolic representation and, as I hope to elucidate, in the context of the Roman domestic setting. The onus is on us to interpret rather than to classify-to throw ourselves into the depth of the situation as it is presented by the reality of the Pompeian house as a phenomenon. Our access to its nature and its significance as the result of human creative activity, as a product of ‘poiesis’, rests upon the conservation of the physiognomy of the spatial setting and its current availability for experience. To engage oneself bodily, as it were, in the situational paradigm that we call the Pompeian house is not to attempt a simulation of what it must have been like, in the literal sense, to be a middle-class Roman in the early Empire; but rather, it is to participate in a mode of dealing with being in the world. Authentic understanding, whether of Roman art or of art made yesterday, is never a matter of historical reconstruction, fact upon fact, event after event, piecing together information; it is a matter of revelation by interpretation.
