Abstract
Masks, as a locus of mimetic potential, serve both to typify and to disguise, distilling character traits and translating them visually, even as they hide the visage of those who might wear them, suggesting a performative persona through the partial negation of the form of the actor. As a multi-dimensional depiction, they enable the generation of distance between viewer and viewed, translating an animate individual into an inanimate object and thus, through the intervention of a worked surface, inviting interpretation. To explore the ways that these ideas interact within a domestic space, the article focuses on the House of the Gilded Cupids, interrogating the interplay between materiality and depiction by pairing masks with mirrors, considering the ways in which both media use surface to highlight liminality, eliding viewer and viewed in a complex commentary on the mutability of visual perception. Highlighting the juxtaposition of inset obsidian panels with depictions of reflective surfaces in the mythological wall paintings within the domestic space, the article argues that the conflation of mirror, mask, and reflection within the space enables the viewer to utilize depicted conceptual doubles to both reinforce and undermine the boundaries of the viewer’s embodied reality in order to confront the extent to which an individual is predicated on perception, both internal and external.
Highlights
The polysensory multi-valenced interplays within Pompeian domestic spaces invite engagement.As visitors move through the space of a house, they are confronted with a system of quantum-like complexity, with multiple potential interpretations of spatial and social interactions all simultaneously extant
Even as the visitor observes one level of interaction, that observation alters the system, prompting an iterative cycle of insight and reaction. Such interplays are themselves loci of commentary within these spaces, as wall paintings and sculptures, spatial boundaries and environmental mediations are joined and juxtaposed in an exploration of the slippages between experience and perception
One found in the north portico between the first two columns and the second found near the wall of the south portico, depict female theatrical masks (Powers 2006, pp. 187, 196; Sogliano 1907, pp. 590–91)
Summary
The polysensory multi-valenced interplays within Pompeian domestic spaces invite engagement. Even as the visitor observes one level of interaction, that observation alters the system, prompting an iterative cycle of insight and reaction. Such interplays are themselves loci of commentary within these spaces, as wall paintings and sculptures, spatial boundaries and environmental mediations are joined and juxtaposed in an exploration of the slippages between experience and perception. While such juxtapositions may be implicit interlocutors in Pompeian houses more generally, in the. Even as visitors are met with successive layers of visual and environmental interventions, designed to impress and engage, they confront social processes that otherwise are largely both invisible and uninterrogated
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