The Lineup: Passion, Transgression, and Mythical Women in Roman Painting

Abstract

Five fresco fragments from a second-century villa at Tor Marancia outside Rome, now housed in the Vatican Museums, depict five mythological women guilty of crimes – adultery, incest, treason, bestiality, and suicide – shown in different moments of desire, intention, and remorse. The series recalls the popular literary catalogues of passionate women by Latin authors as well as performances, but painted on the walls of a small room, the static series invited particular kinds of viewer response. I argue that viewers could associate the figural types and poses (schemata) with well-known images of women in similar straits. The iconography of the figures suggests sophisticated viewing habits and a kind of intervisuality quite like the intertextuality found in written versions of the same tales. The Tor Marancia frescoes appear to be one surviving example of a much older, ongoing tradition of Greek and Roman pictorial galleries of tragic heroines.