Pompeii, Its Life and Art

by August Mau

Characteristic among these sculptures are the figures designed for the adornment of fountains; a number of them are exhibited in the Museum at Naples. Bacchic figures are met with most frequently. A good example is the marble Silenus in the garden of the house of Lucretius; the water spurts from the opening in the wineskin which the old man carries. The design of the small bronze satyr in the peristyle of the house of the Centenary is more pleasing; an opening in the wineskin, held under the left arm, cast a jet against the outstretched right hand in such a way that the water was thrown back upon the satyr's body.

Fountains were adorned also with genre groups and animal forms. We have already noticed the two bronze groups in the peristyle of the house of the Vettii, each representing a boy holding a duck, from the bill of which sprang a jet of water ([Fig. 162]). The largest collection of animal forms was about the basin in the middle peristyle of the house of the Citharist; it comprised two dogs, a boar, a lion, a deer, and a snake, each throwing a jet into the basin below. The fountain jets, however, were not in all cases so closely related to the ornamental pieces. A number of those in the house of the Vettii sprang from lead pipes near the figures. The familiar bronze statue of the seated fisherman, in the Naples Museum, belonged to a fountain, in which the jet was thrown forward, not from the figure, but from the mouth of a mask projecting from the stump on which the fisherman sits.

Of the statues of divinities set up for worship in the temples, there are unfortunately but few remains. The most important fragment is the head of Jupiter, discussed in a previous chapter ([Fig. 22]). Three wretched terra cotta statues of the gods of the Capitol were found, as we have seen, in the temple of Zeus Milichius; and mention has been made also of the herms and other specimens of sculpture in the courts of the temples of Apollo and Isis, and in the palaestra. More numerous than any other class of sculptures, however, are the small bronze images of tutelary divinities preserved in the domestic shrines. These are of interest rather from the light which they shed on the practices of domestic worship than from their excellence as works of art, and it seems unnecessary to add anything here to what has already been said in regard to them in the chapter dealing with the arrangements of the Pompeian house. But occasionally there were large domestic shrines, in which statues of merit were placed; among these are two worthy of mention.

In the corner of a garden belonging to a house in the first Region (I. ii. 17) is a shrine faced with white marble, in which was a small marble statue of Aphrodite, partly supported by a figure commonly identified as Hope, Spes. The carving is in no way remarkable, but the statue is of interest on account of the well preserved coloring applied to the eyes, hair, and dress. The group is now in the Naples Museum.

A more important example, from the aesthetic point of view, is the statue of Artemis, of one half life size, shown in [Plate XI]. It was found in a house near the Amphitheatre which was excavated in 1760 and covered up again. It is a careful copy, made in the time of Augustus, of a Greek masterpiece produced in the period of the Persian Wars. The original was probably the Artemis Laphria mentioned by Pausanias. This was a work of Menaechmus and Soedas, two sculptors of Naupactus. Previous to the battle of Actium it stood in a sanctuary in Calydon, whence it was removed by Augustus, who presented it to the colony founded by him at Patras.

The goddess appears in this statue as a huntress, moving forward with a firm but light step; the bow in the left hand has disappeared. The copyist was remarkably successful in impressing upon his work the gracious and pleasing character of the original; the later archaic Greek art, in spite of its conventions, is full of human feeling. The copy preserved also the coloring of the model; but the tinting of the Roman colorist was probably less delicate than that of the Greek limner who added the polychrome decoration to the marble original. The hair was yellow. The pupils of the eyes were brown, the eyelashes and eyebrows black. The rosettes of the diadem were yellow, and the border of the outer garment was richly variegated in tints of yellow, rose color, and white. Traces of rose-colored stripes are visible also about the openings of the sleeves, on the edge of the mantle at the neck, and on the border of the chiton.

Besides the bronze statues of Apollo and Artemis already mentioned ([pp. 88], [352]), four others of those found at Pompeii are worthy of more than passing notice,—the dancing satyr from which the house of the Faun received its name, the small Silenus used as a standard for a vase, the so-called Narcissus and the Ephebus found in 1900.

Fig. 258.—Dancing Faun. Bronze statuette, now in the Naples Museum.