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Master Narratives and the Wall Painting of the House of the Vettii, Pompeii
Beh Severy-Hoven
From the god in the doorway who pulls aside his clothing to weigh his exposed penis against a bag of money on a set of scales, to the reception room scene of a stripped king being torn apart by his crazed female relatives (Figure 7), the paintings in the House of the Vettii have titillated tourists and intrigued scholars since they were first uncovered in Pompeii in the 1890s. What questions about ancient Italian society can we productively bring to bear on these images, and how should we formulate them?
Two studies from the 1990s point to some intriguing avenues of approach to these old walls. David Fredrick and Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow use feminist film theory, particularly Laura Mulveyâs pioneering work on the male gaze in twentieth-century cinema, to reveal some of the work done by mythological paintings in Pompeii in encoding social hierarchies.1 In her 1975 formulation, Mulvey theorises how the patriarchal conditions of early Hollywood produced a cinematic language which was male. In particular, she applies psychoanalytic theory to film and the way it âstructures ways of seeing and pleasure in lookingâ by highlighting two features of the gaze which please the male viewer by protecting him from symbolic âcastrationâ, a loss of power or privilege.2 One of these features is embedded in the way images are presented visually: parts of the female body are focalised, exaggerated or beautified, which distracts the viewer from that bodyâs lack of a penis and the implied threat to the male viewerâs own. The second means is via narrative; Mulvey argues âthe male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectificationâ and so enjoys the active role of moving the story along.3 The arc of many of these male-driven stories also ultimately condemns those who are female, providing entertainment through either their punishment or forgiveness for their lack of a penis.4
Although Mulvey specifically addresses film, particularly âillusionistic narrative filmâ from mainstream Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, scholars have applied her perspective to numerous other forms of imagery to understand how they encode patriarchy.5 Using film theory to understand mythological panels is particularly compelling because these still paintings allude to well-known stories. This type of art, thus, both focuses the viewerâs eye and presents a full story arc, much like film, particularly the way Mulvey approaches film. Moreover, as Katharina Lorenz has recently emphasised, images in houses tend to be juxtaposed within rooms in unique ways â that is, although the same scene from a myth might be repeated within a house or across different houses, only rarely do different rooms or houses combine a similar set of mythological scenes.6 In the way its paintings compositionally and thematically correspond and contrast, each room and each house thus tells its own story using both image and narrative. Finally, ancient Pompeii was a male-dominated society, and it is well worth considering how the paintings in houses inscribed local power structures and pleased patrons.
Fredrick and Koloski-Ostrow, the classical scholars who bring Mulveyâs cinematic perspectives to bear on ancient Italian painting, indeed bring forth important insights; however, both authors also come across imagery which contradicts Mulveyâs patterns. As Fredrick observes,
[T]he erotic object is not only female in wall painting: it can be anatomically female or male, or both â Narcissus, Endymion and Hermaphroditus are all popular. Moreover, a significant number of the victims of sexual violence in the paintings are male (e.g., Actaeon and Hylas); their symbolic castration is also on display. What might these passive or feminized male forms contribute to the grammar of erotic bodies on Pompeian walls?7
Koloski-Ostrow comes to a strikingly similar question in analysing the paintings of the Casa del Menandro and Casa degli Amorini dorati using the same theoretical framework to understand what she rightly sees as the âstrongly erotic and violent content of this mythological repertoireâ.8 After using an image of Actaeon to explore the workings of Mulveyâs gaze, she observes that this male figure, physically torn apart by his own hunting dogs after catching sight of a bathing goddess, Diana, suffers the very âcastrationâ which Mulvey argues men fear and from which early- to mid-twentieth-century cinema provides pleasing avenues of escape.9
My goal is to work on these questions posed by Fredrick and Koloski-Ostrow, to pick up again this conversation across epistemologies and to interrogate both bodies of knowledge â studies of ancient wall painting and psychoanalytically-based feminist film analysis. How do Pompeian wall paintings contradict the patterns articulated by Mulvey? What are some ancient sources of these contradictions? How do the âcamera angleâ, the internal gazers and the narrative presented in paintings position and please the viewer? What are some modern sources of these contradictions, that is, how have subsequent film theorists responded to Mulvey and what do they bring to the question of how âpassive or feminized male forms contribute to the grammar of erotic bodies on Pompeian walls?â10
My answers will proceed along two vectors. In one, I point to the vast cultural and epistemological gap between twentieth-century Euro-American psychoanalytic theory and ancient Italian concepts and experiences of gender and sexuality. Mulvey, drawing upon Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, gives primary, perhaps even exclusive weight to the differences between male and female bodies. I will argue that it is productive to contrast this focus on gender with ancient Italian practices of slavery, in which what we conceive of as gender, if used in isolation, might have done a poor job of articulating relationships of power. A case study of the decoration of a house in Pompeii potentially owned by a former slave helps explore this contrast. In two paired receiving rooms of the House of the Vettii, the formal compositions of the paintings deliberately call our attention to possible comparisons and contrasts. The imagery resonates with Roman slave practices; paired scenes of corporal punishment and sexualised violence negate the difference between male and female and focus on other means of articulating status hierarchies, particularly the dominion of gods over mortals. In several paintings the Vettii and the artists they commissioned combine stories from Greek mythology in unique ways to assert the status of the owners as masters. In this ancient Italian home â and I suggest in many others â a master gaze significantly inflects the male one.11
Although this first vector reclassifies some imagery in the context of ancient slavery as not gender inversion or instability, but as a pleasurable visual mastery over both male and female bodies, other paintings in the house do encourage the viewerâs identification with, rather than avoidance of, suffering. For example, these same rooms juxtapose a painting of a visually objectified princess, Ariadne, who later wins immortality, with an image of the male hero Hercules, who also became a god, shown as a child being attacked by snakes. The scenes again equate a male and female body, but now they are the protagonists, divinised at the end of the âfilmâ, so they also encourage the viewer to identify with the suffering Ariadne and Hercules. In Mulveyâs terms, the viewer bears the burden of sexual objectification in these images, and âcastrationâ is not avoided. How should we understand the appeal of these images? What can they tell us about Pompeian society?
Scholarly reaction to Mulveyâs work in the field of film studies proves useful, particularly Carol Cloverâs 1992 analysis of a different violent art, American and British horror films of the 1970s and 1980s.12 In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Clover explores multiple examples of cross-gender viewer identification and the pleasures of pain. Clover also sees this phenomenon as able to be explained only partially via psychoanalytic theory because of a cultural distance: âmany horror scenarios have a pre-Freudian and premodern castâ.13 In considering the popularity of violent, gender-bending films, however, Clover also draws attention to Mulveyâs blind spot on masochism, the pleasures viewers feel when they are scared or sympathise with characters in pain. Fredrick also points to the potential in analysing how some ancient paintings explore alternative, subordinate subject positions via mythological or fictional characters, although his explanations for this move tend to focus on the anxieties of elite Roman males.14 Given the broad popularity of such images in Pompeian homes, and their prominence in the case study house (which certainly was not owned by a member of the elite from the capital), I will d...
