MANTO x PALP; or, Pompeii room-by-room
written by Greta Hawes
It’s teaching recess here at Macquarie University. I’m lucky enough to be spending it with crack team of PACE interns from the Department of History and Archaeology and we’re doing a very deep dive into the world of Pompeian wall paintings.
As someone who’s needed lots of images of Greek myth for lectures and presentations over the years, I’m pretty familiar with the “greatest hits” of Pompeian frescoes, with all their lively beauty and saturated colour. But I’d never really thought about this tradition in its entirety. Last year I learned that PALP (Pompeii Artistic Landscapes Project) was tagging all these artworks according to what they depicted, and I spotted an opportunity. Several conversations with Eric Poehler and Sebastian Heath later, and after some pilot investigations with Ewan Coopey and Jessica McKenzie, we were all set up to try to add as many Pompeian wall paintings into MANTO as we could.
Wall painting from Pompeii showing the Trojan Horse being taken into the city. 1st c. CE. National Archaeological Museum, Naples inv. 9010. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
As ever, we’re pulling in as much existing data as we can, but not shying away from the hard work of hand-curating data and then double checking everything. Collaborating with PALP means that we can (re-)use the work they’ve already done in identifying each house and its spaces, and in gathering together information about the wall paintings (including from the extraordinary Pompeii in Pictures). We could also use PALP’s list of “concepts” to create a preliminary dataset of spaces that had mythological scenes.
Macquarie PACE internship, day two. Image: Greta Hawes.
Our work started in earnest this week. We are wading methodically through the enormous volumes of Pompeii: Pitture e Mosaici, which is one of the sources for PALP, where it’s (machine-)translated into English. Beyond the opportunities for an upper-body workout these volumes provide, they record all the evidence for wall paintings at Pompeii, at least as known in 1990. This work is now starting to appear in MANTO’s data — there’s a good sample attached to Ariadne, for example.
Of course, excitingly, new things emerge from Pompeii all the time, and recent announcements of new wall paintings of Phrixos and Helle, Paris and Helen, and Cassandra and Apollo remind us that we inhabit an ever-changing field.
Detail of wall painting from the Casa dei Capitelli Colorati (VII, 4, 51.31, oecus 24) in Pompeii showing Ariadne asleep on Naxos, and the arrival of Dionysos. 1st c. CE. National Archaeological Museum, Naples inv. 9278. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Working through this material house-by-house, room-by-room has been a real education in the extraordinary scale and complexity of Pompeii and its long history as an excavated site. I’m intrigued to find images of wall paintings that were left half-finished at the time of the eruption, and other ones over-worked with graffiti. Some are beautifully crisp and vibrant, others almost destroyed by the elements, many were captured in beautiful drawings and paintings at the time of excavation. From a mythological point of view, the material seems very constrained. About a dozen repeated episodes dominate: I have lost count of how often I’ve encountered Ariadne abandoned on Naxos, or Narcissos gazing at his reflection, or Adonis dying of his wounds in Aphrodite’s lap. Yet this material is also certainly full of surprises. (And as Virginia L. Campbell has observed, some of the surprises reside in the fact that certain stories just do not get depicted on Pompeian walls at all!)
For the next few weeks, I’m turning this blog over the the fantastic group of Macquarie interns that have been heroically working their way through Pompeii house after house, room after room, one sleeping Ariadne after another. I look forward to reading about their insights and interests.