I have now taken you from the front to the back and to the front again of a Roman house.  Now I am going to take you through the house one more time, but paying attention more to how each part is decorated to serve the purposes of the space and the patron who uses it.  I am also going to outline how these decorations change over time, but keep in mind that as these changes occur, houses themselves are generally changing, going from traditional Italian houses with public space on the main axis to Greek houses and villas with private, garden space on the main axis.

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So we return to the entrance to the house.  The model on the left once again shows how restricted the entrance was.  On both sides of the entryway are the shutters to the shops that dominate the facade of the house.  This is a model of a particular house called the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, which you can visit to this day, and when you do, the first thing you see when you step up to the fauces is the mosaic on the right.  It pictures a rather ferocious canine --it even has blood dripping from its jaws if you look closely-- and the sign along the bottom reads "CAVE CANEM," Latin for "Beware of the Dog."  In your reader is a short passage from an author named Petronius and his work the Satyricon.  The narrator in this passage describes coming upon just such a mosaic when he enters a house.  He is terrified by it because he thinks it's real!  Now, this is intended as a hyperbolically silly reaction, but the idea is right.  The owner of the house put this there to make an impression.  This is not just a cheap sign, either.

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A mosaic is constructed by a mosaicist, whom you see on the left, carefully placing hundreds or thousands of colored cubic stones called tesserae in a mortar bed of cement, usually supported by a wooden frame, as you see on the right.  Now, some mosaics are better than others, and you could special order one or choose from a mosaicist's stock, leave space in the wall or floor where you want the mosaic, and they would deliver it and install it.  In any case, this is a lot of work for every mosaic, and we will see a number of examples both on walls and floors of Roman houses.  With every one you see, keep in mind the expense and effort the owner took to choose and place it.

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When proceeding along the main axis into the traditional Italian house, ritual use determined virtually all the arrangement and decoration.  I spoke earlier about how the arrangement of the fauces, atrium, and tablinum worked to establish business relationships.  Even more central to the Roman way of life was the ritual form any and all action in this space would have taken.  The Roman head of household, called the paterfamilias, was, in terms of the way he controlled the space of his house, very much like a Roman priest or soothsayer.  A traditional Roman priest had to be very precise about the direction he stood, the movements he made, and the words he spoke.  Similarly, the paterfamilias controlled the direction and arrangement of the main axis of the house.  The parallel between the paterfamilias and the priest was more than just formal.  Romans did not only go to temples to engage in worship.  They had a great many religious rituals which they performed at home.  For example, Roman families maintained a great reverence for their tradition and heritage.  The atrium typically held the imagines maiorum, which were masks of the deceased members of the family.  These could be polished figures like the ones you see in the hands of the figure of the left.  They could also be simpler wooden figures, and we're quite lucky that one example of these has survived, which you see on the right.  The figures are standing in their original family shrine.  You can imagine the effect these are to have on not only family members but on visitors.  Family members are constantly imbued with the spirit of the family's genius, its own familial protective divinity.  Visitors, while awaiting the paterfamilias, were surrounded by the family's ancestors, and presumably reminded of the family's greatness.

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There were other personal deities and rituals as well.  The painting on the left shows one family's lar, another protective spirit.  The serpent at the bottom is actually a symbol of protection.  This painting comes from one house's shrine to their lares.  On the right you see a  full lararium.  This particular lararium actually comes from a niche in a rear part of a house, more in the private space.  It was a very different statement, of course, to put your ancestral shrine in the atrium as opposed to a niche in a back room.  And it should come as no surprise that as the Romans increasingly developed the private space of their homes that they brought their taste for ritual with it.  Even private space had to be arranged and decorated to its purpose.  The garden-like peristyle had to have the appropriate decorations and components so that you knew it was a country getaway and you could act appropriately, by relaxing and reflecting.

Even villas, whose purpose and design was to get away from the traditional home and urban life, still were carefully arranged.  For example, a villa would be chosen for its location and access to beautiful views of the coast or natural beauty of the land.  But then the windows and such would be designed not to provide a panorama of the area, but tightly constructed particular views of something.  The views were then also designed in sequence.  This was considered the ideal design of a country villa.  Since villas were a sign of comfort and status, designs in urban homes came to imitate those of a villa.  The goal became to give the illusion of villa life and of the controlled views of natural beauty they offered.

 More specifically interior decorations also are devoted to broadcasting a particular type of illusion and publicizing certain allegiances and tastes.  Then as now, tastes changed and competition sets in, so decoration ensembles change in style over time.  For convenience, scholars have labeled four basic styles across the classical period.  The Romans themselves, of course, did not call them first, second, third, and fourth style as we do, but they were very aware of changing styles and fashions.

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This is first style, popular originally from 200 to 80BC.  The basic idea of first style decoration was to pretend you had fancy marble fixtures and the like.  Marble and columns were expensive, but you could fake it with paint and plaster.  So, for example, the columns and moldings you see in the photo above are plaster imitations.  And while much of the original paint has now fallen away, in their original brightness the colors were designed to look like the color of expensive marble sheets.  Often the floor in such ensembles was covered with a simple geometric mosaic, and in the latest phase possibly an extra ornamental picture mosaic might be included.  But overall the idea was to imitate genuine if expensive house fixtures with more affordable imitations.

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This is Second Style, popular roughly from 80BC to 20BC, which would have been popular in Cicero's time, for example.  Second style represents an immediately recognizable change, though in some ways it is a logical extension of first style.  Once you have accepted the idea of using paint and plaster to create an illusion, why not carry the idea all the way?  On the left you see how elaborate the illusion can become, when enhanced by many bright colors and freed from expectations of realism.  All the columns and moldings you see are painted.  Where first style typically broke the view of a wall down into three levels, second style took this over and elaborated on each plane separately.  You can see part of the lower panels, while the middle level dominates here.  Note especially the attempt to create depth and perspective.  In the upper register, there is a painted window even, and you can see the top of a temple which is supposed to be next door.  Creating the perspective illusion of actually seeing through the wall marks the height of second style.  On the right you get some sense of what a full second style ensemble looked like, with once again a mosaic floor pattern and the designs running around all three sides of a room.  This is a triclinium, a dining room, where the owner would definitely have wanted to impress his guests at those important dinners.

Here is an even more ornate example.  This is generally identified as a cubiculum, a little bedroom off the atrium, but some scholars make the case that this sort of decoration would never be used for a bedroom and that this must be a dining room, too.  In any case, the photo here illustrates another principle.  The decoration of the walls and floors really dominated the room.  Furniture did not.  While we have recovered some ornate furniture from Roman homes, more often furniture was functional and less the object of attention than than wall decoration.  Eventually, the complexity of second style peaked and generated a reaction against it.

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As second style wall panels began to include architectural features which were absurd and defied even most basic laws of physics, a radical simplicification took over in reaction.  Here you see the same basic three levels and panels, but now the bright panels of color dominate and have only small emblems in the middle and delicate bordering to break things up.  It is in general a more restrained and abstract style of decoration.  This became popular during the Augustan period.  Vitruvius remarks on the rise of this new style, which he dislikes, by the way.  It seems to have dominated popular taste until circa 45 AD, shortly after Claudius succeeded Caligula as emperor of Rome.

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By this time, the restraint of 3rd style had begun to break down.  On the left you can see a more traditional 3rd style atrium, with the large black panels, a black floor, punctuated by the orange painted borders and in contrast to the white table original to the room.  On the right is a tablinum, that all-important reception room, where you can see third style becoming more complex.  The central emblems are larger and the borders becoming more complicated.  The emergence and enlargement of the paintings in the centers of these panels is important for the development of Roman painting.  We get a number of marvelous, famous examples of paintings from just these sorts of arrangements.  For example, look closely at the panel paintings.

On the left is the central panel, a painting of the marriage of Venus and Mars, the goddess of Love and the god of War.  On the right is a side panel showing a seaside villa.  Remember that part of the idea of decoration was to emulate the surroundings of the rich and famous, part of which was the villa.  So if you couldn't have a villa, you could at least put up a painting of one.

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Eventually, the increasing extravagance of third style reaches a point where we declare it a new style.  This is, of course, fourth style.  On the left, you can see full-blown fourth style, with its many panels, large paintings in each one, and intricate border decorations everywhere.  The line drawing gives some sense of how the overall scheme is arranged.  This style is the one prevalent during Nero's day, and would have been the dominate style during the time of the architectural revolution Prof. Scannell lectured on.  It is also the style that lies behind the reading from Petronius' Satyricon, when the mad dinner host Trimalchio talks about the paintings he has.  Likewise, it is the general scheme behind Pliny's letters, which are also included in your reader.  Notice how every part of the wall is busy with something.  The lower register has a series of medallions.  The large middle register has its huge red panels with substantial mythological paintings occupying their centers, and the top register has a series of architectural panels in perspective with characters walking in, out, and around them.  In general, fourth style is known for increasing the portrayal of human forms in decorative art.  It is also famous for the incredibly fine detail to be found.  When you look at fourth style walls, you find hundreds of tiny gems of art all over.  For example, the borders here between the panels in the middle register have several tiny paintings in them.

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On the left you see a border panel from another fourth style room.  Much of the border is devoted to vignettes of tiny cupids engaged in various occupations, as you see on the sides.  In this intermediate panel appear a woman playing cymbals, holding up a candelabra, and beneath her, still another scene.  On the right, you can see the woman more closely and the scene beneath her.  It shows Apollo, victorious after slaying the Python, which is wrapped around the omphalos, the center of Apollo's shrine at his primary oracle at Delphi.  We also find other figures, including the god Hermes in thin little columns, several winding vines and tendrils, another hallmark of this style, and plenty more detailing in the columns and details.  And all this comes in a detail of a detail of a much larger scheme.  Why? you may ask.

To impress your dinner guests, naturally.  These detailed paintings, which you can see well only close up, were all arranged so that particular guests in particular places had very precise views, not only of the paintings, but of the room as a whole and of views into other parts of the house.  All this to impress the guests.