Fallax Imago: Ovid's Narcissus and the seduction of mimesis in Roman wall painting

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Johns Hopkins University, and Harvard University. The author is grateful for the helpful comments offered by her colleagues on each of these occasions. She would also like to thank Bettina Bergmann, Richard Brilliant, Patrick Crowley, Natalie Kampen, Barbara Kellum, Giancarla Periti, and Mitchell Merback for their invaluable suggestions as she worked through different iterations of this article. John Dixon Hunt and an anonymous reader offered much valued guidance in the final stages of composition. The author's husband, Michael Sullivan, helped refine her translations of Ovid and provided his own elegant version of Valerius Maximus's prose, for which she is deeply grateful. Without his love, support, and editorial acumen, this essay would have remained an elusive, undisciplined idea. Notes 1 – Despite their evocative names, very little is actually known about the owners of the House of Octavius Quartio and the House of Lucretius Fronto. The current attribution of House II.2.2 in Pompeii to Octavius Quartio is based on a bronze seal bearing the name ‘D. Octavius Quartio,’ which was found in the potter's shop at the front of the house. Previously, this same house had been referred to as the House of Loreius Tiburtinus. But the name Loreius Tiburtinus is now known to have been an invention of the archaeologist Matteo Della Corte. Lauren Petersen has pointed out that ‘attribution based on a single bronze seal is equally problematic; a portable object, the seal does not in and of itself identify the owner of the house so much as it may reveal the name of someone who frequented the shop, whether as a worker, an owner, or a customer.’ See Lauren Petersen, The Freedman in Roman Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 135. On the owner of House II.2.2, see also Pompei: Pitture e Mosaici 3, ed. Giovanni C. Pugliese and Ida Baldassare (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1990–2003), p. 42; John Clarke, The Houses of Roman Italy, 100 B.C. – 250 A.D.: Ritual, Space and Decoration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 193–94; Matteo Della Corte, ‘I M. M. Lorei Tiburtini di Pompei,’ Atti e memorie della società tiburtina di storia e d'arte, 11–12 (1931–2), pp. 196–200; Matteo Della Corte, Case ed abitanti di Pompei (Naples: Faustino Fiorentino, 1965), pp. 308–10; Vittorio Spinazzola, Pompei alla luce degli nuovi scavi di Via dell'Abbondanza (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1953), pp. 369 ff. The attribution of House V.4.a to Marcus Lucretius Fronto is also not without its problems. The name for this house's putative owner is taken primarily from a number of electoral graffiti painted on the house's façade (CIL (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum) IV 6613, 6625–26, 6633), which recommend him for the office of municipal aedile. The Lucretii are a well-documented aristocratic Pompeian family. Yet House V.4.a seems somewhat modest for someone of elevated rank. A number of explanations for this apparent discrepancy have been proposed by scholars: either the house belonged to someone attached to the Lucretii, or this was but one of several properties owned by Marcus Lucretius Fronto, whose social status and political ambitions are attested by several inscriptions. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Pompei: Pitture e Mosaici 3, pp. 966–67; Clarke, The Houses of Roman Italy, pp. 158–59; Wilhelmus J.T. Peters, La casa di Marcus Lucretius Fronto a Pompei e le sue pitture (Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1993), pp. 409, 411–12. 2 – Roger Ling, ‘The Decoration of Roman Triclinia,’ in In Vino Veritas, ed. Oswyn Murray and Manuela Tecusan (London: British School at Rome, 1995), pp. 239–51. For catalogs of Roman paintings of Narcissus and the popularity of this subject in the first century CE, see Lilian Balensiefen, Die Bedeutung des Spiegelbildes als ikonographisches Motiv in der antiken Kunst (Tübingen: E. Wasmuth, 1990), pp. 130–66; Isabella Colpo, ‘…Quod non alter et alter eras. Dinamiche figurative nel repertorio di Narciso in area vesuviana,’ Antenor, 5 (2006), pp. 57–91; Katharina Lorenz, Bilder machen Räume. Mythenbilder in pompeianischen Häusern (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 189–92; Birgitte Rafn, ‘Narkissos,’ in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 6 (Zurich and Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1992), pp. 703–11; and Karl Schefold, Die Wände Pompejis; topographisches Verzeichnis der Bildmotive (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1957), p. 137. On the dates of Campanian paintings of Narcissus, see (in addition to Balensiefen, Colpo, and Schefold), Irene Bragantini, ‘Problemi di pittura romana,’ Annali di archeologia e storia antica 2 (1995), pp. 175–97, especially pp. 192–96; and Peters, La casa di Marcus Lucretius Fronto, pp. 333, 372–79. These scholars agree that Pompeian paintings of Narcissus all belong to the Fourth Style and must be dated to after 62 CE. 3 – On the Hellenistic Tanagra figurine, see Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie 3 (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1897–1909), p. 17. Balensiefen sees the identification of this Tanagra figurine with Narcissus as uncertain (Die Bedeutung, 51f., n. 224). In the first century CE, representations of Narcissus in media other than painting appear to be the exception: two examples are a carnelian ring stone dated to the Augustan era (Paris, Cab. Méd. 1615bis), but considered a forgery by Adolf Furtwängler, and a stucco relief from Villa Petraro, Castellammare di Stabia (Antiquarium 140/1102). On the Augustan gem, see Adolf Furtwängler, Die antiken Gemmen. Geschichte der Steinschneidekunst im klassischen Altertum (Leipzig and Berlin: Giesecke & Devrient, 1900), Plate 42, p. 14; Rafn, ‘Narkissos,’ p. 708; Paul Zanker, ‘Iste ego sum. Der naïve und der bewusste Narziss,’ Bonner Jahrbücher 166 (1966), p. 152–70. On the relief from Villa Petraro, see Harald Mielsch, Römische Stuckreliefs (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1975), pp. 45–56, 129, K 34, 1, plate 28, 1; Rafn, ‘Narkissos,’ p. 706; and Anna Maria Sodo, ‘Villa Petraro,’ in In Stabiano: Exploring the Ancient Seaside Villas of the Roman Elite (Castellammare di Stabia: Nicola Longobardi, 2004), p. 67–70. On pictorial representations of Narcissus as an exclusively Roman phenomenon, see Isabella Colpo, Gian Luca Grassigli, and Fabio Minotti, ‘Le ragioni di una scelta. Discutendo attorno alle immagini di Narciso a Pompei,’ Eidola 4 (2007), p. 73–118. 4 – For the date of Ovid's Metamorphoses, see Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History, trans. Joseph B. Solodow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 341. For the originality of Ovid's version of the myth of Narcissus, see Ovidio, Metamorfosi II (Libri III–IV), ed. Alessandro Barchiesi (Rome: A. Mondadori, 2007), pp. 175–83; Maurizio Bettini and Ezio Pellizer, Il mito di Narciso: immagini e racconti dalla Grecia a oggi (Turin: G. Einaudi, 2003), pp. 41–114; Luigi Castiglioni, Studi intorno alle fonti e alla composizione delle Metamorfosi di Ovidio (Rome: ‘L'Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1964), pp. 207–54; Gianpiero Rosati, Narciso e Pigmalione: illusione e spettacolo nelle Metamorfosi di Ovidio (Florence: Sansoni 1983); Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century (Lund: Gleerups, 1967). A possible contemporary work, the Diegesis of Konon, a Greek author thought to have lived during the reign of Augustus (31 BCE–14 CE), contains only a synoptic account of the tale of Narcissus. Although Ovid's and Konon's versions of the story have several points in common, it is possible that both drew their material from earlier anthologies of transformation myths without ever knowing of each other's work. See Malcolm Kenneth Brown, The Narratives of Konon (Munich: Saur, 2002), pp. 1–6, 173. For a different view see Bernd Manuwald, ‘Narcissus bei Konon und Ovid,’ Hermes 103 (1975), p. 349–72, n.12, according to whom Ovid knew Konon's work. A recently discovered papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy.4711) points to another possible pre-Ovidian source for the myth of Narcissus. This rediscovered fragmentary poem has been attributed to Parthenius of Nicaea (fl. mid-first century BCE). See Gregory O. Hutchinson, ‘The Metamorphosis of Metamorphosis: P.Oxy.4711 and Ovid,’ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 155 (2006), pp. 71–84. Hutchinson finds that ‘[c]onsideration of the specific stories in the papyrus … shows how Ovid's overt structuring and implicit interconnections [in the Metamorphoses] would have been more striking for readers … who had read this poem’ (p. 77). 5 – Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 4.1448b4–19, where mimesis, in the case of images, is said to offer viewers two related pleasures: one which derives from an appreciation of the artist's skills, and another from reasoning and understanding each represented element. See also Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 177–206. For a more detailed discussion of definitions of mimesis in the Roman period, see below, section II. 6 – Cf. Stephen Hinds, ‘Landscape with Figures: Aesthetics of Place in the Metamorphoses and its Tradition,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 122–49. The locus classicus for Narcissus as the inventor of painting is, of course, Leon Battista Alberti's Della Pittura 3.25–26. See also Jas Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 132–33; David Summers, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 144–49; and Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), pp. 29–41. Alberti's allegorization of the Narcissus myth is typical of Renaissance classicism: although not true to the letter of his classical sources, it is true to their spirit. On Alberti's classicism, see Cristelle Baskins, ‘Echoing Narcissus in Alberti's Della Pittura,’ Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993), pp. 25–33; Kenneth Clark, ‘Leon Battista Alberti on Painting,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 30 (1945), pp. 1–20. 7 – For instance, Elsner in Roman Eyes (pp. 132–76), mentions Ovid briefly, but focuses mostly on the ekphrases of Narcissus by Philostratus and Callistratus, dated to more than a century after the Pompeian wall paintings that constitute the core of his study. In The Moral Mirror of Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Rabun Taylor pays closer attention to Ovid, but discusses Pompeian paintings of Narcissus with little regard for their original context (pp. 56–70). Among recent studies of Pompeian paintings of Narcissus, Lorenz's Bilder machen Räume (see note 2) and Verity Platt's article, ‘Viewing, Desiring, Believing: Confronting the Divine in a Pompeian House,’ Art History 24 (2002), pp. 87–112, offer the most detailed discussions of pictorial ensembles. Platt's approach, however, is greatly influenced by the writings of Jacques Lacan, which are an anachronistic, albeit provocative framework for the understanding of Roman wall painting. 8 – Cf. Barbara Kellum, ‘Review of Jas Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text,’ Art Bulletin 91 (2009), pp. 107–11. 9 – Cf. Michael Baxandall, ‘Pictures and Ideas: Chardin's A Lady Taking Tea,’ in Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 74–104. On points of contact between Ovid's account of Narcissus and Campanian representations of this myth, see Colpo et al., ‘Le ragioni di una scelta,’ pp. 88–89. On the diffusion and reception of Latin poetry in Pompeii, see Marcello Gigante, Civiltà delle forme letterarie nell'antica Pompei (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1979). Scholars have long believed the Aeneid became a ‘school text’ soon after its publication in 19 B.C.E. See Gigante, Civiltà delle forme letterarie, pp. 170, 176ff. For a more recent and nuanced interpretation of Virgilian quotations in Pompeian graffiti, see Kristina Milnor, ‘Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii: The Case of Vergil's Aeneid,’ in Ancient Literacies: the Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, ed. William A. Johnson and Holt N. Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 288–319. After Virgil's poems, Ovid's verses are the most commonly reproduced in Pompeian graffiti. Ovid himself, in his letters from exile, boasts that his poems were more popular at public recitations than those of his rivals (Tristia 2.519; 5.7b,1–4). For a discussion of Pompeian graffiti related to love poems see Gigante, Civiltà delle forme letterarie, pp. 71–74, 185–94, 203–22; Milnor, ‘Literary Literacy,’ pp. 299–302; Antonio Varone, Erotica pompeiana: iscrizioni d'amore sui muri di Pompei (Rome: ‘L'Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1994). 10 – See, for instance, Lawrence Richardson Jr, A Catalog of Identifiable Figure Painters of Ancient Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), especially his comments on the painting of Narcissus in the House of Octavius Quartio, p. 147. 11 – On relationships between wall paintings, architecture, and mnemonic activities in Roman domestic spaces, see Richard Brilliant, Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 53–89; Bettina Bergmann, ‘The Roman House as Memory Theater: The House of the Tragic Poet in Pompei,’ Art Bulletin 76 (1994), pp. 225–56; Bettina Bergmann, ‘The Pregnant Moment: Tragic Wives in the Roman Interior,’ in Sexuality in Ancient Art, ed. Natalie B. Kampen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 199–218; and Bettina Bergmann, ‘Rhythms of Recognition: Mythological Encounters in Roman Landscape Painting,’ in Im Spiegel des Mythos. Bilderwelt und Lebenswelt/ Lo specchio del mito. Immaginario e realtà (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1999), pp. 81–108. See also Mary Lee Thompson, ‘The Monumental and Literary Evidence for Programmatic Painting in Antiquity,’ Marsyas 9 (1961), pp. 36–77, and Karl Schefold, La peinture pompéienne: Essai sur l’évolution de sa signification, trans. J.-M. Croisille (Brussels: Latomus, 1972). 12 – Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Latin texts are my own. On the meaning of imago, see Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. imago. The insubstantiality of Narcissus's reflection is further emphasized by the term umbra (‘shadow,’ Met. 3.417). In some manuscripts of the Metamorphoses, unda (water) appears instead of umbra (shadow). But as Alessandro Barchiesi and Gianpiero Rosati have argued, umbra is a significant variant that deserves serious consideration as a more sophisticated term for ‘reflection.’ Umbra in Latin also evokes the Greek word skia, which is equally rich in semantic possibilities, ranging from ‘shadow’ to ‘infernal specter’ (see Barchiesi, Ovidio, Metamorfosi II (Libri III–IV ), 194–95. See also Philip Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 156–58. 13 – Cf. Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, pp. 173–74; Rosati, Narciso e Pigmalione, pp. 129–52. On key aspects of ekphrasis as a literary genre, see Paul Friedländer, Johannes von Gaza und Paulus Silentarius: Kunstbeschreibungen justinianischer Zeit (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1912), pp. 1–31; Jas Elsner, ‘Introduction: The Genres of Ekphrasis,’ Ramus 31 (2002), pp. 1–18; and Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre,’ Word & Image 15 (1999), pp. 7–18. On the erotics of illusion in ekphrastic texts, see Jas Elsner, ‘Naturalism and the Erotics of the Gaze: Intimations of Narcissus,’ in Sexuality in Ancient Art pp. 247–61; Roman Eyes, pp. 132–52; and Ruth Webb, ‘The Imagines as a Fictional Text: Ekphrasis, Apatê and Illusion,’ in Le défi de l'art: Philostrate, Callistrate et l'image sophistique, ed. Michel Constantini, Françoise Graziani, and Stéphane Rolet (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006), pp. 113–36. 14 – Notice the chiasmus in Met. 3.424 and the mirroring of terms in Met. 3.425–26: Ovid here depicts a reflection through language. 15 – Cf. Barchiesi, Ovidio, Metamorfosi II, pp. 195–96; Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, p. 146; Hinds, ‘Landscape with Figures,’ p. 137. On the paradigmatic status of the visual arts as examples of mimesis, see Aristotle, Poetics 25.1460b8–9. For a discussion of this passage and further instances in the Poetics where visual mimesis serves as ‘a basic reference point for the conceptualization of artistic mimesis as a whole,’ see Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, p. 157 ff. 16 – On the ekphrasis of the images on Juno's temple in Carthage in Aeneid 1, see Robert D. Williams, ‘The Pictures on Dido's Temple,’ Classical Quarterly 10 (1960), pp. 145–51; Alessandro Barchiesi, ‘Rappresentazione del dolore e interpretazione nell'Eneide,’ Antike und Abendland 40 (1994), pp. 109–24; Michael Putnam, Virgil's Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 23–54; Jas Elsner, ‘Art and Text,’ in A Companion to Latin Literature, ed. Stephen Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 313–17. On ekphrasis in Virgil, more generally, see Don P. Fowler, ‘Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis,’ Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991), pp. 25–35. 17 – For the figure of the lover as a model viewer of works of art, see Hérica Valladares, ‘The Lover as a Model Viewer: Gendered Dynamics in Propertius 1.3,’ in Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry, ed. Ronnie Ancona and Ellen Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 206–42. 18 – In a recent study of the Imagines, Zahra Newby argues for a similar construction of educated and uneducated viewers in Philostratus's work. According to her, Philostratus's readers are made to negotiate between being absorbed in the described works of art and the author's demand for erudite analysis and distance. See Zahra Newby, ‘Absorption and Erudition in Philostratus’ Imagines,’ in Philostratus, ed. Ewen Bowie and Jas Elsner (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 322–42. 19 – The phrase repercussae … imaginis umbra (‘the shadow of a reflected image,’ Met. 3.434) recalls Ovid's earlier description of Echo's voice: alternae … imagine vocis (‘by the semblance of a reflected voice,’ Met. 3.385). In both cases, Narcissus mistakes acoustical and visual reverberations for actual presences. For the perceived similarities between the senses of hearing and seeing in the work of ancient authors, see Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 4.216–29. See also Barchiesi, Ovidio, Metamorfosi II, p. 196; Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, pp. 154–56. 20 – On Ovid's use of unice (Met. 3.454), cf. Barchiesi, Ovidio, Metamorfosi II, p. 199. 21 – Cf. Philostratus's Imagines 1.28 (‘The Hunters’), where a similar disjunction between seeing and hearing is employed both to describe the painting's illusionistic quality and to alert the viewer/reader that it is an image he or she sees. See also Elsner, ‘Naturalism and the Erotics of the Gaze,’ pp. 249–52; Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, pp. 154–55. Narcissus's realization that it is himself he loves is one of Ovid's most significant innovations. In none of the earlier versions of this myth does Narcissus recognize that he and his beloved are one. See Barchiesi, Ovidio, Metamorfosi II, pp. 177–78; Vinge, The Narcissus Theme, pp. 12–13; Zanker, ‘Iste ego sum,’ p. 152. 22 – Narcissus's mention of imago in Met. 3.463 is an eloquent indication of his self-recognition. Compare his words at the moment when he realizes that it is himself he loves (iste ego sum: sensi, nec mea fallit imago) to earlier expressions of his reflection's deceptiveness directed at the reader: e.g. Met. 3.416 (visae … imagine formae, ‘the image/reflection of a perceived form’); Met. 3. 434 (repercussae imaginis … umbra, ‘the shadow of a reflected image’); and Met. 3.439 (mendacem … formam, ‘a lying likeness’). 23 – Cf. Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion, p. 144, and Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, p. 34. 24 – Cf. Newby, ‘Absorption and Erudition,’ pp. 326–41; Valladares, ‘The Lover as a Model Viewer,’ pp. 212–19; Elsner, ‘Naturalism and the Erotics of the Gaze,’ pp. 253–6. 25 – On Pliny, Natural History 35.65, see Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 27–40; Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 1–12; Helen Morales, ‘The Torturer's Apprentice: Parrhasius and the Limits of Art,’ in Art and Text in Roman Culture, ed. Jas Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 182–88. 26 – The novelty of Narcissus's madness is reinforced by the fact that he is the first human being to fall in love in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Barchiesi remarks that Apollo's love for Daphne (Met. 1.452–567) and Narcissus's love for his own reflection consciously play with several topoi of Latin elegy: e.g. love's insatiability; the connection between love and death; the lover's vow to die of love; love's illusions and delusions; and vision's primacy over reason in the elegiac erotic experience (Ovidio, Metamorfosi II, p. 179). 27 – For example Plato, Cratylus 420a–b and Phaedrus 250d–51c. See also Valladares, ‘The Lover as a Model Viewer,’ pp. 212–16; Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 57–83. 28 – Richard Wilbur, ‘Twelve Riddles from Symphosius,’ Collected Poems 1943–2004, p. 19. 29 – Hinds, ‘Landscape with Figures,’ p. 141; Platt, ‘Viewing, Desiring, Believing,’ p. 89. On the wall paintings in the House of Octavius Quartio, see also Pompei: Pitture e Mosaici 3, pp. 42–108, Clarke, The Houses of Roman Italy, pp. 193–207; Lorenz, Bilder machen Räume, pp. 538–40. 30 – The expression locus amoenus already existed as a literary concept in the late first century BCE. According to Servius, the fourth century commentator on Virgil, loca amoena are places full of pleasures (voluptates), especially pleasures affecting the sense of sight (Servius, ad Aen. 5.734). Isidore of Seville records a slightly different definition, which he attributes to Varro: according to him, loca amoena are places that ‘furnish love and lure people into loving them’ (Etym.14.8.33). See John D'Arms, Romans on the Bay of Naples: A Social and Cultural Study of the Villas and their Owners 150 B.C. to A.D. 400 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 47; Hinds, ’Landscape with Figures,’ pp. 125, 130, 147. 31 – On the date of Roman representations of Pyramus and Thisbe, see Ida Baldassare, ‘Piramo e Thisbe: dal mito all'immagine,’ in L'Art décoratif à Rome: à la fin de la République et au début du Principat (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981), pp. 337–51; Pascale Linant de Bellefonds, ‘Pyramos et Thisbe,’ in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 7 (Zurich and Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1994), pp. 605–07. On Diana and Actaeon in Roman art, see Lucien Guimond, ‘Aktaion,’ in ibid. 1 (1981), pp. 454–69; Eleanor W. Leach, ‘Metamorphoses of the Acteon myth in Campanian painting,’ Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung, 88 (1981), pp. 307–27; Erika Simon and Gerhard Bauchhenss, ‘Artemis/Diana,’ in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 2 (1984), pp. 792–855. 32 – Alfred Frazer, ‘The Roman villa and the Pastoral Ideal,’ in The Pastoral Landscape, ed. John D. Hunt (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1992), p. 54. Frazer was greatly influenced by Paul Zanker's interpretation of Campanian townhouses as miniature copies of elite villas. See Paul Zanker, ‘Die Villa als Vorbild des späten Pompejanischen Wohngeschmacks,’ Jarbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 94 (1972), pp. 460–523. Later translated and revised as Pompeii: Public and Private Life, trans. Deborah L. Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 135–206. For a critique of Zanker, see Petersen, The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History, pp. 129–36. 33 – On Roman dining couches and the custom of dining al fresco, see Katherine Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 38–40, 144–50. On Roman dining rooms and dining customs, see also John Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representations and Non–Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.–315 A.D. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 223–45; and Matthew Roller, Dining Posture in Ancient Rome: Bodies, Values, and Status (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 34 – On the construction and symbolism of pastoral landscapes in Ovid's poetry, see Charles Segal, Landscape in Ovid's Metamorphoses: A Study in the Transformations of a Literary Symbol (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner Verlag, 1969), and Hinds, ‘Landscape with figures,’ pp. 126–40. 35 – On Ovid's account of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, see Barchiesi, Ovidio, Metamorfosi II, pp. 256–69. 36 – Brilliant, Visual Narratives, pp. 71–72; Bergmann, ‘The Roman House as Memory Theater,’ pp. 225–26. 37 – On animal paintings in Pompeian gardens and their evocation of Hellenistic hunting parks (paradeisoi), see Wilhelmina Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius (New Rochelle: Caratzas Brothers, 1979), pp. 68–73. See also Lorenz, Bilder machen Räume, pp. 394–97. The venatic motif on the north wall of the pergola was reiterated and expanded upon by several marble sculptures that once lined the central channel. These included a lion holding the head of a ram in its paws (Pompeii inv. no. 2922), a lion tearing an antelope to pieces (Pompeii inv. no. 2929), and a hound attacking a hare (Pomp. inv. no. 2934). See Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, pp. 80–81; Clarke, Houses of Roman Italy, p. 200. In the House of Octavius Quartio, the depiction of a hunt on the north wall was conflated with an image (now lost) of Orpheus charming the animals with his music. The north wall also featured a painting of Venus on a shell, which both called attention to the water channel below and reinforced the amatory motif of the pergola's pictorial ensemble. On the paintings of the north wall of the pergola, see Pompei: Pitture e Mosaici 3, p. 101. 38 – Cf. Elsner, Roman Eyes, p. 160. 39 – Eromenos is the Greek term used to describe the young, passive male partner in a pederastic relationship. In classical art, eromenoi are often represented as physically androgynous, often effeminate in their looks. On Narcissus as an eromenos, see Colpo et al., ‘Le ragioni di una scelta,’ pp. 92–93; Winfried Prehn, ‘Der Spiegel des Narziss. Die Bedeutung sozialer Geschlechterrollen für die Narzissiconographie,’ in I temi figurativi nella pittura parietale antica. IV sec. a.C.–IV sec. d.C. : atti del VI Convegno internazionale sulla pittura parietale antica (Bologna, 1995), ed. Daniela Scagliarini Corlàita (Imola: Bologna University Press, 1997), pp. 107–11; Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art, pp. 72–73. On Roman attitudes towards pederasty, see Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self, pp. 92–98; Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 32 ff.; Ramsay Macmullen, ‘Roman attitudes to Greek love,’ Historia, 31 (1982), pp. 484–502. On idealized representations of eromenoi in the Roman imperial period, see Elizabeth Bartman, ‘Eros’ Flame: Images of Sexy Boys in Roman Ideal Sculpture,’ in The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, ed. Elaine Gazda (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 249–72; David Konstan, ‘Enacting Eros,’ in The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 354–73. 40 – Cf. Platt, ‘Viewing, Desiring, Believing,’ pp. 87–90, 101, 106–07. 41 – On the myth of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid's Metamorphoses (3.138–252), see Barchiesi, Ovidio, Metamorfosi II, pp. 146–63. 42 – A rather corrupt passage in Pliny's Natural History (36.35) appears to describe a sculpture of ‘Venus washing herself’ (Venerem lavantem sese) by Doidalses that stood in one of the temples of the Porticus of Octavia in Rome. This sculpture is thought to have been the model for the numerous Roman copies after this type now known as the ‘Crouching Venus.’ See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 321. On the similarities between the painting of Diana on the pergola of the House of Octavius Quartio and the ‘Crouching Venus,’ see Platt, ‘Viewing, Desiring, Believing,’ p. 100, and Lorenz, Bilder machen Räume, p. 209. 43 – On the paintings in cubiculum i, see Pompeii: Pitture e Mosaici 3, pp. 1000–08; Clarke, Houses of Roman Italy, pp. 159–61; Elsner, Roman Eyes, p. 155; Peters, La casa di Marcus Lucretius Fronto, pp. 300–08, 332–39, 373, 379. On ancient painting galleries see Albert W. van Buren, ‘Pinacothecae: With Especial Reference to Pompeii,’ Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 15 (1938), pp. 70–81; Karl Lehman–Hartleben, ‘The Imagines of the Elder Philostratus,’ Art Bulletin, 23 (1941), pp. 16–44; Bettina Bergmann, ‘Greek masterpieces and Roman recreative fictions,’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 97 (1995), pp. 79–120; Elsner, Roman Eyes