Wall painting depicting Phaedra and Hippolytus from the House of Phaedra, Pompeii, ItalyPompeii Archaeological Park
Posted on 10/26/2024 11:57:29 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Reuters reports that a small house lacking an atrium but decorated with well-preserved frescoes has been discovered in the Roman city of Pompeii, which was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The site has been named the House of Phaedra after the mythological queen of Athens, who is depicted in one of the paintings with her stepson Hippolytus, who refuses her advances. Other wall paintings depict patterns, scenes from nature, an encounter between a satyr and a nymph, and gods who may represent Venus and Adonis.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
Wall painting depicting Phaedra and Hippolytus from the House of Phaedra, Pompeii, ItalyPompeii Archaeological Park
The other GGG topics added since the previous digest ping, alpha:
These appear to be by the hand of the same artist who painted some frescoes in another Pompeiian house, let's see... the images are in a coffee table book I've had for years... hmm... I'm not a good housekeeper... oh no, my copy got buried in an eruption... let's forget it, I'm going from memory anyway... the list of this week's Digest topics is just above here.
Put some clothes on for cryin’ out loud!
...said no heterosexual man, ever! ;^) Well, maybe to Helen Thomas...
Amazing.
Hey, they found your old villa frescoes you had done in a former life! Brilliant work. Looks like “mandingo” Greek style.
That will improve the house’s resale value.
She doesn’t look Athenian...
Some velvet morning....
I was stationed in S. Italy in late 70s and toured Pompei - it was fascinating...
We spent a few months in Italy decades ago.
Visited Pompeii a few times.
Spent the whole day every time.
It’s the only place in Europe anymore that I would get on a plane to visit.
Herculaneum is pretty cool, too.
The place really needs a once-over before the realtor gets there, it’s been a while since housekeeping has been through...
Oh, *frescoes*, I was looking around for the 2-liter...
It appears that the copper-lookin’ guy on the right was painted using a bronze statue for a model, a practice used by other fresco artists (or indeed, the same guy in multiple houses, probably was well known and in demand).
The Romans really liked Greek sculpture and had plenty of that done, but bronze replicas were preferred for private villas particularly if they were to be displayed outdoors. And like the marble originals, they were painted to look more real (kinda like concrete lawn critters are today).
During the Middle Ages quite a lot of Roman-era marble statuary was basically heisted, dragged off to workshops, and put into a kiln to be rendered into lime for mortar. What an atrocity.
I’d love it, maybe a bucket list thing, probably won’t travel again though.
There are theories that the skin tone denoted power and strength vs feminity and “womanhood”.
Many paintings depict dark men and light women.
The rape of ruins and statues, as in your example, was a horrible crime.
Yet maybe some things got preserved that would have been lost. The doors to St. John Lateran are from the Roman Senate [Curia Julia]. And they are awesome.
OTH, the marble from the Colosseum probably would have been better left there.
It was also an artistic convention to denote that men typically went outside to earn and whatnot, and women remained were in the home.
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