Beyond this we come to a spacious recess, 59 feet wide, which seems to have been open in front. It had a large niche at the bottom, a pedestal in the middle, and a secondary recess, with an altar at each side. There are small niches, as if for eight other altars, in this edifice, but if all fragments of brick or rubble that carry to us the appearance of altars, were really dedicated to the worship of their divinities, the Pompeians must have been a very religious people. This building was incrusted with marble, and whatever may have been its destination, it was evidently a magnificent and highly finished structure. Further on are some small rooms, with a marble portico in front, with the peculiarity already noticed, of a cornice which projects, and is complete on both sides, so as to render it doubtful if it were not a mere screen of single columns rather than a portico.
The northern end of the forum is occupied by the Temple of Jupiter, which is prostyle and pseudoperipteral, with six Corinthian columns in front, above 3 feet in diameter: this is large for Pompei: those of the portico of the forum are little more than two, and when we consider that the temple is elevated on a high basement, and that being of the Corinthian order, these columns were probably considerably higher in proportion than the others, as well as more ornamented, we shall find that the temple preserved its due superiority as the leading object in the place. The capitals are lying on the ground, and we may observe in them the original coat of stucco following the stone, and over that another thicker, not precisely in the same disposition, and much inferior both in drawing and execution. As it seems probable that these were thrown down by the earthquake and not restored, they would indicate an earlier date than that before obtained for this miserable stucco; and perhaps we may attribute it to the colony introduced by Sylla. This temple was hexastyle, prostyle, and hypæthral. The internal opening was surrounded by Ionic columns, and there are three little cells at the extremity, the use of which is unknown but their masonry is not bonded with that of the building, and they may therefore have been additions. There is a triumphal arch on each side of this temple. Both have been ornamented with marble, and probably with statues, but one more richly than the other. They are not in corresponding positions, the plainest being brought forward to the front of the portico of the temple of Jupiter, while the more ornamented is kept back, and even partly behind it.
The streets towards the Amphitheatre are not cleared out, and this monument stands quite detached from any other object of interest. It resembles in essentials other amphitheatres, and seems to have been almost without external ornament. There are some peculiarities of construction and of access, but nothing of importance.
I shall not enter into a particular description of each private house, but endeavour to give you a general idea of their disposition and effect. There are of course a great many which have no architecture, properly so called, but are merely built to occupy a little ground, and at little expense; even these had each an internal court. In the larger edifices, the parts towards the streets were let out for shops, except that the owner preserved one division to give an entrance into the principal apartment. This entrance was wide and lofty, and adorned with pilasters; through it you pass into the atrium, which was usually an oblong on the plan, with one or three recesses towards the end, the whole forming, together with the entrance, a sort of Latin cross; the middle part of the cross being open to the sky. Sometimes the projection of roof, which covered everything but this opening, was supported by columns, forming in that case, the Tuscan atrium of Vitruvius, and the recesses are the exhedræ, or perhaps the alæ. Even in this part there is considerable variety, as the design was modified to suit the convenience, the taste, or the caprice of the proprietor. Small apartments are disposed round the atrium, and receive their light from it, not by means of windows, though there are also a few windows to be found, but by the doors, which are very high, and of which the upper part was probably left open for that purpose. In most of the houses there was nothing more, or the back of the atrium opened merely into a little garden; but in the larger mansions, beyond the atrium, we find the cavædium, a court surrounded with columns, with exhedræ similar to those of the atrium, and giving light to other apartments. In the house of Pansa, the exhedra at the bottom of the cavædium opened into a colonnade towards the garden. The effect, looking through two courts, and in fact through all the principal parts of the edifice, must have been very striking, and it is so still; but you would not like to live in a house, even in a warm climate, where all the sitting rooms were exposed, and no retirement or privacy to be obtained, but in a badly lighted bed-chamber. In spite of this reflection, one cannot see this arrangement without longing to produce something of the same effect, consistently with our customs and our climate, but it is, I am afraid impossible. The exhedræ, or intermediate spaces between the atrium and cavædium, or either of these and the garden, are among the most richly decorated parts of the house. This openness both ways would produce an agreeable coolness in hot weather. There is always a little passage on the side to provide against their becoming thoroughfares for the family, and there are sometimes traces of a balustrade, and of provision for a temporary division by a curtain, which might be occasionally drawn either for warmth or privacy.
In the private houses as well as the public buildings, we may see examples of the depraved taste of the period, and bad plaster preferred to good stone-work, but in general the columns in the houses are of brick covered with stucco, and all the ornaments are of painted stucco. All the houses seem to have been ornamented with painting, and even the outside of the gate of the city has been stuccoed and painted. These painted decorations are of a light, fantastic architecture, but frequently of graceful forms. A similar style occurs in the baths of Titus at Rome, and the subjects have often been published. In the panels formed by these architectural representations, we find paintings of figures, of men and animals, of buildings, and of landscapes. The architectural part I am little inclined precisely to imitate even in painting, yet I think something may be extracted from it, and applied to the decoration of rooms with great advantage; and many hints may be gained from it. The paintings of buildings (as objects) which sometimes occur, are done without taste, and without any just perspective; they may give hints to the antiquary, rather than to the artist. You have heard the paintings of the figures compared to the compositions of Raphael or Guido. The comparison is ridiculous; they might more reasonably be put in competition with those of Polydore Caravaggio. The composition is very simple, but almost always good, hardly ever comprising more than two or three figures. The details of drawing are defective, but the form and attitude are graceful; the action lively and spirited, the colouring at once rich and natural. In short the effect is almost always pleasing; and without pretending to consider them as rivalling the first-rate productions of modern art, one may safely assert, that if we were to compare them with the decorations of the walls of any city of modern Europe, the advantage would be greatly, very greatly in favour of Pompei. The landscapes are much inferior to the figures.
You know that in these houses almost every utensil of the kitchen has been found, and of the other domestic establishments and toilet of the ancients, even to the little vessels of rouge with which the ladies heightened their colour. These are removed to the museum of Portici, or most of them now to that at Naples. It was the best thing which could be done, they would not have borne exposure to the air, and it would be too much to expect that a whole city should be converted into a covered museum. The same may be said of the best paintings; but enough is left to shew how they were disposed, and a few of them have sheds erected to protect them from the injurious effects of the atmosphere. Several narrow and inconvenient steps are remaining in various parts, which prove the occasional existence at least of an upper story, and some have vaults underneath, where the inequality of the ground required it.
Just out of the best preserved gateway, on the north-west of the city, is a long avenue of tombs. The most usual form is that of a large, oblong pedestal, surmounted with a scroll at each end, and placed on a high basement; but some of them are square buildings, ornamented with columns or pilasters, the foliage of whose capitals is in the style of those of Tivoli; and one is round. Two of the first sort remain nearly perfect, and are really very handsome; a great many others, stripped of their marble casings, offer to the eye mere masses of rubble-work; yet, damaged and imperfect as they are, they produce a powerful impression; perhaps however, rather because there is enough remaining to guide the imagination to the rest, than from the combinations which actually remain. In one of these tombs there was a marble door turning on pivots, a method which seems to have been generally adopted in the doors of the ancients: this door has been repaired. In another the cinerary urn, lamps, &c. are left in their niches, just as they were discovered: even these we find ornamented with stucco and painting in the same style as the houses. Besides the tombs, there are in the same street, three exhedræ, or semicircular benches of stone, each with a stone back; and the bench is terminated at each end with the winged leg of a lion; a favourite ornament at Pompei. One of these exhedræ is covered, but the covering seems not to have made part of the original design. We find also here a Triclinium, supposed to be for the lectisternium. It consists of a small court, about 19 feet by 13. The couch surrounding three sides of the table is a mass of rubble-work covered with stucco, the surface sloping from a small, oblong table, which is placed in the middle. Immediately in front of this table is a still smaller circular pedestal.
Many marble fragments are scattered about this part of the excavations, some of them are capitals, with a row of eight leaves at bottom, a flower or head above the leaves, and a kind of winged ornament; and a volute at the angle, formed of a sort of water-leaf, with a long curled point. Capitals exactly similar, are not unfrequent among the Athenian fragments, and as these at Pompei are of Pentelic marble, it is probable that they were brought from Athens.
Behind the tombs on each side of the way, there are remains of villas, one of which is attributed to Cicero; but these are very imperfectly exposed. At the end of the range is one belonging to Marcus Arrius Diomedes, which is a very interesting specimen of the domestic architecture of the time. The entrance is at the corner of a court, surrounded by columns, which are painted red and yellow. In one part there is a semicircular room, with three large openings into an unoccupied piece of ground, which one is apt to fancy, in compliance with our own habits, to have been irregularly ornamented with shrubs and flowers, and to have merited the name of a garden. There are two baths, one for hot, the other for cold water, with the stoves for warming the former, and several small rooms about them. At the back is a large court, surrounded by an open gallery, where square pillars and flat brick arches supply the place of columns and epistylia. This gallery is a story below the level of the entrance floor; a terrace on that level overlooks it, and there are vaulted rooms, which you might call cellars, underneath the terrace, but their rich decorations shew the taste of the owners for the coolness of these semi-subterranean apartments.
The mosaics at Pompei are of two sorts; the first has a groundwork of stucco, with a pattern formed of little squares of white marble, or sometimes of black, or of both, fixed into it. The footway of the streets is generally done in this manner; the white squares are placed diagonally in continued lines, at a considerable distance apart, and more appearance of design is produced from this simple arrangement than you would easily conceive; in the houses, where it is executed with more care, the effect is very good, but that composed of black squares is decidedly inferior to that where white alone are employed. The more finished mosaics are composed entirely of small squares, or tessere, generally black and white, but sometimes also of various colours; the patterns are very fanciful, some of them very good, but among the good there is nothing which has not long been in use in modern times, for one sort of ornament or another. These mosaics do not seem very ancient in Pompei, for wherever one finds them in use among the ancient architecture, they uniformly bury a portion of the lower part of it.