The Shadow of Vesuvius by Daisy Dunn

Author:Daisy Dunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
ISBN: 9781631496400
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

It is tempting to see the influence of Pliny the Elder’s passages on art in the design of the Tuscan estate itself. Outside, in the hippodrome garden, Nature was shaped by artifice. Inside, in the rooms used for entertaining, artifice was shaped by Nature. Pliny described a bedroom painted with a fresco of birds sitting on branches.33 Fragments discovered at the site of his villa provide further clues to its decoration. Leaves and vines were painted in stylised columns and framed by theatrical trompe l’oeil panels on walls of red, white, azzurro and yellow.34 Carvings depicted scenes from theatre and myth as though they derived from Nature. A deceptively friendly-faced gorgon poked out from a frieze; a griffin – resembling a cat with wings – posed in profile; a theatre mask carved in deep relief had eyebrows raised so high that they consumed the actor’s entire forehead.35 Pliny the Elder wrote in his encyclopaedia of a species of people from Scythia (the Russian Steppe) with a single eye in the centre of their foreheads who warred against griffins for gold.36 It is uncertain whether he would have known the surviving designs from the villa or whether they were introduced later by his nephew, but they point to a man whose tastes were for the lively and cheering.

The carvings and wall paintings, many of which are characteristic of the first century AD, provided a suitably dramatic backdrop for the entertainers who came to perform at the villa after Pliny inherited it. Forgoing his evening entertainments throughout the winter to retreat to his soundproof study, Pliny liked to invite lyre players and comedians to strum and jest away the long light nights of the summer. On some evenings at the Tuscan estate he was joined by his wife, Calpurnia, who had been known to adapt his poems to the cithara and sing to them. Whenever Pliny gave readings from his own work to groups of male guests, she would ‘sit behind a veil’ and wait eagerly for the applause. Her aunt, Pliny said, had ‘often predicted that I would seem to my wife to be such a man as I am now’.37 He prided himself on being as good a husband to her as she was a wife to him.

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