Despite the rich scholarship on Roman replications of Greek sculpture, painting poses a problem. Roman frescoes may have looked to Greek panel paintings for inspiration, but there are few if any straightforward ‘copies’, and the discrepancy between archaeological evidence and literary sources gapes more widely than for other artistic media. Into this scholarly dilemma steps Nathaniel Jones, with a subtle analysis of the myriad ways in which Roman mural painting incorporated, reflected and elaborated upon Greek painting traditions during the late republican and early imperial periods.
J. focuses upon the Roman predilection for ‘meta-painting’—the ‘painting of painting’ that began in murals of the Second Style, permitting genres such as mythological narrative, landscape, erotica and ‘still life’ to be framed within architectural perspectives. Drawing on studies of meta-pictoriality by W. J. T. Mitchell, Louis Marin and Victor Stoichita, J. demonstrates that devices seen as typical of early modernity have a complex prehistory that is worthy of attention in its own right. In his opening chapter, he peels back the layers of historiographical reception that have shaped modern assumptions about the Roman pinacotheca style, parsing the scholarly gymnastics of Winckelmann and others as they sought to reconcile the ‘Greek’ content of fictive panel paintings with the ‘Romanitas’ of the frescoed walls from which they had been literally and virtually excised. Key to this enduring tension is the idea of fictionality—the dizzying duality of a hypothetical ‘as-if’ in which Hellenising panels can operate as second-order fictions within the first-order fiction of mural schemes. In their use of meta-pictorial framing elements, Roman paintings of paintings are both ‘doubling and disrupting’, illusionistic and recursively self-disclosing. As such, they are compelling visual agents that perform both theory and history, existing in a complicated relationship to both place and time.
In his second chapter, J. outlines antiquity's longer tradition of meta-pictoriality whilst nodding to broader theories of framing, from Kant's problematic notion of the parergon to Derrida's deconstructive response and Stoichita's analysis of the ‘self-aware’ image's play between surface and aperture. His approach aligns with the 2017 volume on The Frame in Classical Art edited by Michael Squire and myself, but extends the debate by putting Roman pictorial fictiveness into conversation with epigraphic evidence for the Greek lexicon of painted panels. The rich vocabulary applied to pinakes in Hellenistic inventories from Delos provides precise precedents for panel types depicted in Roman fresco painting (whether shuttered, pierced, suspended or embedded), suggesting that they corresponded to well-known classes of objects. These were creatively incorporated into mural compositions that depended on the material ‘independence’ of their second-order fictions while subsuming them within their own material surfaces. Importantly, J. observes, Roman frescoes rarely ‘break’ their internal frames in overt disruptions of their own fictiveness (unlike Attic vase-paintings), but prefer to emphasise the painted panel's material and ontological autonomy.
Why this should be is explored in ch. 3, which contextualises the use of meta-painting in first-century b.c.e. houses on the Palatine (the so-called Houses of Augustus and Livia) within Roman attitudes to the collection and display of Greek art. Here J. distances himself from overtly programmatic readings, looking instead to broader Roman debates over the appropriate incorporation of Greek spolia into the public and private realms. Fictive panel paintings, he argues, traffic in ‘both specificity and vagueness’ (112), engaging in ‘deeply complex layering of fictions, games of mediation, and articulations of history’ (113) that are inextricable from the ‘bifurcated’ value ascribed to art in a culture that, as Cicero proclaimed, ‘loved public munificence but abhorred private luxury’ (116, citing Mur. 76). They could import the aesthetics of Greek painting whilst distancing their material referents, which were more morally acceptable (and politically effective) when displayed in the public setting of portico or temple. This process required complex acts of remediation, which J. explores in ch. 4 (on ‘Medium and Materiality’), the book's most original contribution to the field. Drawing on Bolter and Grusin's analysis of the play between ‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’ in the visual arts, J. explores how the Villa della Farnesina frescoes simultaneously reify and destabilise acts of illusionistic representation, particularly through their use of monochrome grounds, which operate as both opaque material surface and transparent ‘atmosphere’ (thus evoking Aristotle's notion of the medium as diaphanous metaxu). In ch. 5 (‘Paradigms, Ensembles, and Anachronisms’), this ‘dual logic’ is extended to a broader (albeit familiar) range of fictive collections. Rather than casting these as virtual pinacothecae that advance a triumphalist narrative of Roman appropriation through replication (dependent upon a teleological and encyclopaedic model of art history), J. suggests that their fictive panels should be understood according to a model of ‘paradigmatic participation’ that operates according to ‘open-ended relations of exemplarity’ (179). Remediation liberates the painted wall to participate in a more creative, flexible and even ironic relationship of ‘anachronicity’, whereby Roman art can participate in the history of Greek painting on its own terms, celebrating its own virtuosity in the process.
Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome is an exciting and important contribution to the field of ancient painting that should be read by anyone working on Roman art and Roman receptions of Greek culture. Theoretically sophisticated, clearly written and carefully historicised, it skilfully employs visual and literary evidence to illustrate complex arguments about representation, mediation and cultural translation. In many respects, J. brings to compelling conclusion a set of questions about illusion, pictorialism and representation that have dominated the field of ancient painting studies for some time. Where questions remain, they pertain to that continuous material surface that is the Roman fresco itself. Although J. is alive to the medial complexities at work in fictive panels, he tends to pass over the self-effacing media of plaster and pigment that made such first- and second-order fictions possible in the first place. The fiction of a dematerialised category of the ‘aesthetic’ is itself dependent upon the material conditions in which such fictionality plays out; we would do well to remember that the fantasy of remediation is inseparable from those abstract, non-figural components of the painted wall that enable, exceed and defy the seductions of representation.
