Fig. 13.6 Piazza Armerina, Imperial Villa, Labors of Hercules, mosaic (detail). (Pace, Mosaici, Pl. 7)
The child’s Circus (33), unlike the hunt, is rather fantastic than brutal. Around a spina with a single obelisk, as in room 8, run four miniature chariots drawn by pairs of birds in the appropriate stable colors: green wood-pigeons, blue plovers, red flamingoes, and white geese. As usual, Green wins, and is awarded the palm. Servants with amphorae sprinkle the track to lay the dust. It is all vivid, detailed, alive, more illuminating than a dozen pages in a handbook.
The masterpiece among the mosaics is clearly the labors of Hercules cycle in the triclinium (46). These were part of a standard repertory, available for copying from a book of cartoons (we have seen this sort of thing in Pompeii), but here the artist has stamped his own personality on the hackneyed scenes. In his hands they are at once learnedly allusive and bloodily violent. Thus the Augean stables, which Hercules cleaned by diverting a river to run through them, are simply suggested by a river and a pitchfork. Violence is often rather hinted at than insisted on, as in the slit-like eye of the dying Nemean lion, or the Picasso-like protruding eye of the terrified horse of Diomedes ([Fig. 13.6]). Sometimes the effect is gained by a topical touch, as when Geryon, the triple-headed giant, is given a suit of scaly armor, like the barbarians (cataphractarii) on Trajan’s column. But the full baroque excess, as insistent as in the frieze from the Pergamene altar, or the Laocoön group, comes out in the scene in the east lobe where five huge giants, foreshortened with a technique which anticipates Michelangelo’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, convulsively, despairingly, imploringly, yet full of impotent rage, turn their deep-sunk eyes to heaven as they strive to pull from their flesh Hercules’ deadly arrows, steeped in the blood of the Centaur Nessus. In the north lobe the apotheosis of Hercules is no doubt the mosaicist’s enforced tribute to his Imperial master, but in the scenes of metamorphosis in the entrance-ways to the apses—Daphne into a laurel, Cyparissus into a cypress, Ambrosia into a vine—he is following his own paradoxical bent, accepting as it were the challenge of expressing so dynamic a thing as the change from one form to another in the obdurate medium of mosaic.
The ten “Bikini Girls” (38) come last, because these mosaics, which overlie another set, are obviously later than the rest. They owe their fame to the scantiness of their costumes, as brief as any to be seen on modern European beaches. Gentili thinks they are female athletes, being awarded prizes, but Pace may be nearer the truth in supposing that they are pantomime actresses, with tambourines and maracas, performing in a sort of aquacade, the blue tesserae in which they stand representing water. There is ancient evidence for this curiously decadent art-form. Martial speaks of actresses dressed—or undressed—as Nereids swimming about in the Coliseum, and the Church fathers fulminate against such spectacles. When the orchestra of the most august of theaters, that of Dionysus in Athens, was remodelled in Roman times to hold water, we must suppose, since the space is too small for mock naval battles, that the place once sacred to the choruses of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was thereafter used for the aquatic antics of just such actresses as the Piazza Armerina mosaics portray. Tastelessness and grandeur, conspicuous waste and a daring architectural plan: this paradoxical blend, so characteristic of the villa, explains both what is meant by decline and why it took the Empire so long to fall.
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The villa at Piazza Armerina belongs to an age when Christians were persecuted: the motifs in the mosaics are almost aggressively pagan. But Maximian’s son-in-law Constantine became in the end a convert to Christianity, and built, beginning about A.D. 322, in honor of St. Peter, a great basilica church on the Vatican Hill, replaced in the Renaissance by the present building. In 1939, at the death of Pope Pius XI, who had asked to be buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s, excavations for his tomb created the occasion for transforming the crypt into a lower church. In lowering the floor level of the crypt for this purpose, the workmen came, only eight inches down, upon the pavement of Old St. Peter’s, Constantine’s church. This in turn rested upon mausolea with their tops sliced off, and their interiors rammed full of earth. At the direction of Pius XII, these mausolea were scientifically excavated.
What was revealed was a pagan Roman cemetery, in some places thirty feet below the floor of the present church. The mausolea were all in use and in good repair when Constantine began his church in A.D. 322: the earliest brick stamp found in the area dates from the reign of Vespasian, A.D. 69–79. The excavations were carried out under conditions comparable in difficulty only to the recovery of the Altar of Peace: the same constant battle with seepage, the same problem of underpinning one structure in order to read the message of another. Under these formidable difficulties, the cemetery was cleared, and archaeologists found the reason why Constantine moved a million cubic feet of earth and went so far as to violate sepulchres to build Old St. Peter’s on just this site. Whatever modern walls it was necessary to build were carefully marked with Pius XII brick-stamps, that future archaeologists might be in no doubt as to which masonry was modern and which ancient. The cemetery may now be visited by small groups with special permission, under the expert guidance of a polyglot archaeologist. The story he has to tell was not published until over ten years after the excavation began, in a massive two-volume Report which stands fifteen and three-quarters inches high, contains 171 text figures and 119 plates, and weighs fourteen pounds. Fortunately its objectivity is as impressive as its bulk. The archaeological evidence is lucidly set forth, and no conclusions are drawn which exceed it.
We know from Tacitus that Nero, in his search for scapegoats on whom to shift the blame for Rome’s great fire of A.D. 64, martyred Christians in an amphitheater on the Vatican Hill, and tradition has it that in this amphitheater St. Peter, too, suffered martyrdom. It was to test the validity of this tradition that Pius XII ordered the cemetery under St. Peter’s excavated. What was found was a series of twenty-one mausolea and one open area (P in the plan, [Fig. 13.7]), all facing southward onto a Roman street. The mausolea are plain brick on the outside, highly baroque within, enriched with mosaics, wall-paintings, and stucco-work. There are both cremation and inhumation burials, but when the mausolea were filled in inhumation was beginning to predominate. Of the mausolea only M is entirely Christian in décor; others began as pagan, later admitting Christian burials, or adapt pagan motifs to Christian symbolism. M contains the earliest known Christian mosaics, which Ward Perkins and Miss Toynbee call a microcosm of the dramatic history of Christianity’s peaceful penetration of the pagan Roman Empire. They are dated by technique and motifs to the middle of the third century A.D. The subjects are Jonah and the whale, the Fisher of Men, the Good Shepherd, and, in the vault, Christ figured as the sun. The wall paintings of the cemetery are mostly pagan, the contractors’ stock-in-trade, depicting in myth or in symbol the soul’s victory over death. The great artistic interest of the mausolea is in the stucco-work, both in relief and in the round, superior in quality to that of the subterranean basilica at the Porta Maggiore. Some of it is of unparalleled scale and complexity, excellently preserved ([Fig. 13.8]), and now protected from dampness by large, constantly burning electric heaters. Of stone sculpture in the round there is very little; it was probably removed by Constantine’s workmen. But there are many marble sarcophagi with pagan and Christian motifs, testifying to the artistic revival enjoyed by the Roman world with the peace of the Church in A.D. 312. They show how the stonemasons carved them as blanks, filling in details like inscriptions and portrait busts to the customer’s order. There is a pathetic one of a baby, who died, the inscription tells us, when he was six months old. There are reliefs of Biblical scenes: the children in the fiery furnace, Joseph and his brethren, the three Magi, and what may be the earliest Christian cross, dated about A.D. 340; (an alleged cross at Herculaneum is more probably the scar of a ripped-away wall bracket).
Fig. 13.7 Vatican City, excavations under St. Peter’s, plan of west end.