White Marble at Pompeii: Sampling the Casa dei Vettii

J. CLAYTON FANT

and Stefano Cancelliere, Lorenzo Lazzarini, M. P. Martinez, Bruno Turi

Introduction

In spring 1992 Fant spent a morning in the Vettii garden on an errand not related to marble and emerged struck by the quantity of marble and apparent variety of marble sources represented. This led to a working hypothesis that the Vettii had assembled a wide range of white marble as a competitive statement in the luxury race. Luna marble was becoming relatively cheap and readily available by the late Neronian and early Flavian periods, and more and more Pompeians were using it in quantity. Thus Lunense had become a depreciated currency. But the Vettii were not rich enough or well enough connected to be able to obtain the new polychrome marbles popularized by the official architecture of Rome (Fant 2001a). Implicit in the working hypothesis is also the assumption that cultivated Romans were able to distinguish varieties of white marble from one another and were interested in doing so.

Acknowledgements

The Vettii sampling project was supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the University of Akron Faculty Research Committee, as well as by in-kind contributions from L.A.M.A, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, and the Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università di Roma. We are most grateful to Dott. Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, Soprintendente alle Antichità di Pompei, and his staff for permission to carry out this research and for efficient collaboration during it. Fant thanks the Kress Foundation for supporting his travel to Venice to deliver the paper.

Site Selection

The House of the Vettii is unique among pre-modern excavations at Pompeii in documentation and the integrity of its contents. Early in the clearing the superintendent Sogliano determined to make the house a showplace, and both he (Sogliano 1898) and August Mau (Mau 1896) published detailed descriptions of the house. These descriptions guarantee the arrangement of furniture in the garden today (Ill. 1) as original. Although the house was old at the time of the earthquake, it was extensively renovated after AD 62 (De Vos 1977; De Vos and De Vos 1988, 167ff.). Rooms designed in imitation of a pinacoteca (painting gallery) and creation of a "sculpture garden" (calling it a viridiarium misunderstands the nature of the space) are helpful evidence that the owners, the freedman brothers A. Vettius Restitutus and A. Vettius Conviva, who was an Augustalis (Della Corte 1965, 67-71) were clearly interested in ostentation and ready to spend money to achieve it (Clarke 1991, 208f.; Zanker 1998, 191f.). Thus the furniture of the garden serves as a good model the ostentatious use of non-sculptural marble.

Procedure

Lazzarini and Cancelliere sampled the objects in November, 1999. 20 samples were taken from the garden of the Casa dei Vettii by drilling and 7 in the form of chips. Petrographic analysis of selected samples was carried out by the same in the Laboratorio per Analisi dei Materiali Antichi in Venice. Turi and Martinez performed the isotopic analyses in Rome. Samples are numbered on the plan (Ill. 2) starting from the small gate on the W side giving entry to the garden and proceeding clockwise.

Results

Isotopic results (Table 1 and Ill. 3) and petrographic analysis (Table 2) suggest clear proveniences for the 20 pieces sampled. Objects not sampled, designated by Greek letters, are also included in Table 2 when a provenience based on macroscopic inspection could be confidently proposed.

The varieties of white and gray marbles present are these:

Paros 2 nos. 3, 5, 6, 7-8, 14, 17, 18, 19-20

Thasian dolomitic (Cape Vathy) no. 16

gray Lesbos no. 9

Proconnesian no. 3

Paros 2, a coarse-grained variable marble from Chorodaki, was identified only recently and is emerging as the major source of Parian marble in the Roman empire for non-sculptural uses (Fant 2001b, 16; Germann et al. 1988). No Parian lychnites, the pre-eminent sculptural marble of the Hellenistic and Roman periods (Pollini et al., 1998), is present.

The working hypothesis is supported in that there are many varieties of marble present, but the emphasis does not appear to be on number alone. Marble type does not dominate the arrangement of pieces in the garden, but their disposition was carefully thought out, and marble type was certainly a prominent criterion alongside overt characteristics such as shape and decorative details like moldings and rosettes. Let us then look at symmetry first. Five symmetrical groups are evident; the first two are the most obvious and most clearly intentional.

Group 1 Round basins in the four corners

These are shallow circular basins in the scalloped angles of the gutter at the four corners.

Only three of the four survive (the one at the SE corner is missing); all four bases survive. Three of the four supports are fluted; the NW support is flat.

The NW and NE basins are in gray marbles, Luna bardiglio and Lesbos, respectively (Ill. 4). No. 19 at the SW is in the grayish veined variety of Paros 2. There is an evident attempt to match marble types here, but it is careless and ineffective. The grays on the more richly decorated North side are not similar in pattern (Ill. 5). Nor do the supports harmonize well with their basins: the SW corner basin sits on a support (no. 20) of Paros 2 but of dissimilar appearance. The Lesbos basin (no. 9) is matched with a support (no. 10) in Lunense.

Group 2 Four rectangular basins in the middle of each side

These pieces mark out the dominant N-S and E-W axes (Ill. 6). The E-W axis does not bisect the East and West sides but is offset to the N so as to continue the line of sight from the fauces through the atrium across the peristyle (Clarke 1991, 214). The four pieces match quite well. The East and West basins and their slab supports are Pentelic (no. 1-2, W side; no. 13-12, East side). Both supports are decorated with rosettes on their East sides, thus no. 1 turns its back on viewers strolling on the West side of the peristyle; the view from the atrium was the important one. The basins on the North and South sides do not match in marble type: respectively, no. 5 is Paros 2, but no. 16 on the S side is dolomitic Thasian marble from Cape Vathy. They are not a close match in color or grain size.

Group 3 Two large circular tables

Group 4 "Antiques," older objects in limestone

A fourth set of correspondences is less clearly intentional. On the North and South sides located in the intercolumniations between the corner columns and the next column East are two older objects or rather combinations of unrelated objects.

Group 5 A line of basins from the N side out into the garden

These create a line of sight (Ill. 9) rather than a concerted sequence of shapes. In order, they are:

No. 5, rectangular basin, Paros 2

No. 7, rectangular basin, Paros 2

No. 14, shallow circular basin, answering those in the angles, Paros 2

The basin at the end (No. 14) represents the focal point of the whole composition, although it is actually off center. The large basins are all in Paros 2.

Objects on the chief N-S axis (Group 5) are concentrated on the shorter Northern half, where the principal exedrae are, and are all of Paros 2. It would be interesting to know whether Pompeian marble dealers made a distinction (or were aware of the distinction) between Parian lychnites and Paros 2 from Chorodaki. It is tempting to speculate that they were both called simply Parian.

Variety of marbles was not a design element in any precise sense. To make a quartet of gray basins, at least three varieties were used-- probably not as a point of ostentation but necessity. Supports were paired with basins with little concern for harmony or marble type.

(NB: tables here are not final drafts)

Sample numbers begin at the small gate near the SW corner and proceed clockwise around the perimeter and then inside. Objects noted as "not sampled" were considered identified with reliability macroscopically; the macroscopic identification of S is Fant’s alone. Greek letters refer to entries in Fant’s notebook, where supports are grouped with principal objects.

Plot and field values from Gorgoni et al. 1998. Proveniences marked with an asterisk* are macroscopic only.