Verity Platt

Viewing, Desiring, Believing: confronting the divine in a Pompeian house

This paper explores the interrelationships between a set of Pompeian wall-paintings of the first century AD. Three mythological scenes inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses are arranged around a portico leading to a chamber decorated with imagery associated with the cult of Isis. The panels all depict a tragic meeting of desirous gazes, making them particularly receptive to a Lacanian reading, which explores the way in which each scene is triangulated with the male viewer, through the arousal of his own desire, and the scopic traps of illusionistic naturalism itself. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of naturalistic and religious modes of viewing collapses the categories of the secular and sacred, complicating the relationship between two supposedly different Greco-Roman aesthetic traditions. The paper explores two potential readings – religious imagery as a ‘safe’ resting-place for the potentially dangerous gaze, or a blurring of categories by which the sacred and secular are equally subject to that paranoia of the general gaze which imbued Imperial Roman society.

The Matter of Classical Art History

Though foundational to the study of art history, Greco-Roman visual culture is often sidelined by the modern, and overshadowed by its own cultural and intellectual reception. Recent scholarship, however, has meticulously unpacked the disciplines formative narratives, while building on archaeological and literary studies in order to locate its objects of analysis more precisely within the dynamic cultural frameworks that produced them, and that were in turn shaped by them. Focusing on a passage from Pliny the Elders Natural History (arguably the urtext of classical art history), this paper explores the perennial question of how the material stuff of antiquity can be most effectively yoked to the thinking and sensing bodies that inhabited it, arguing that closer attention to ancient engagements with materialism can alert us to models of image-making and viewing that are both conceptually and physically grounded in Greco-Roman practices of production, sense perception, and interpretation.