Allan Ramsay and the Search for Horace's Villa by Ian Gordon Brown

Author:Ian Gordon Brown [Brown, Ian Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138733244
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

5.8. Plan of Horace’s Villa, from G. Lugli, ‘La villa sabina’, 1926

Also quite progressive is Ramsay’s survey of the ancient remains all around the Licenza valley. He was interested not only in standard questions such as the identification of Horatian place names, but also in such new problems as whether Horace had any neighbours and, if so, where their properties might be located. In giving the results of his survey, he reported finds not otherwise known, such as an inscription on an altar at the door of a peasant in Licenza.102

Ramsay’s sympathy for the country people enabled him to track down places and objects that other investigators missed, perhaps because they did not stay at Licenza as long as he did and because they were not nearly so open to intercourse with the uneducated inhabitants of the valley. Bernardo Pomfili (whom Ramsay familiarly calls ‘Bernardo’) showed him the ruins of an important structure in opus reticulatum on his land not far from the villa site.103 Ramsay’s informant thought that the cubilia on his land were used as pavement for a road, but Ramsay preceptively noted that the Romans never used this construction technique for laying causeways. He was quite right, too, to ponder the still unresolved question of how the villa site was reached by a diverticulum from the main Roman road through the valley. Another man in Rocca Giovine invited Ramsay into his house to see a missing piece of the Victory inscription over the door (Fig.5.9), and Ramsay went beyond previous students of the inscription by probing the circumstances that may have surrounded Vespasian’s restoration of the temple of the goddess.104 Other natives told him about various place names (Il Sainese, Il Pomario etc) that gave him leads (albeit possibly false) about the ancient identity of the areas.105 At least once he appeared to have misunderstood what his informants told him when he reported the find of a ‘marble chariot’ instead of ‘a cartload full of marble’, though in general his Italian was quite good.106 Ramsay’s most significant discovery was the mosaic in room Gi on the Lugli plan. It is easy to imagine that it was Ramsay’s interest in the inhabitants of the Licenza valley that enabled him to be the first scholar on record to see this pavement; in his description of how he came to view the mosaic, he wrote as though it had long been known to ‘the master of the vineyard’ and did not imply that it was found through his own independent efforts.107 Even if we might wish that Ramsay had dug more extensively on the site, he must be praised for garnering as much information as possible from local peasants. Here, Ramsay looks forward to the Romantic antiquarians of the nineteenth century.108

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