I want to show you, in the few minutes that remain, just two more houses quickly. One of them, both of them are important though. Because they belonged to the Emperor and Empress to Augustus and to Livia. Augustus purchased some property on the Palatine Hill. He wanted to live as Rome's first Emperor of Rome, he wanted to live where Romulus had lived before him, of course. And he buys some property up here, builds a house, he puts a, a temple to his patron god, right next door, Apollo. And then Livia has her own house right across the street: his wife Livia. She lives with him in his house, but she's also got her own house right across the street. And both of these houses were decorated with paintings. I want to show you first the ones in the House of Augustus, the most famous room in the House of Augustus, called the Room of the Masks. And here is where we see most clearly the possible relationship between Roman wall painting of the Second Style--because this is also Second Style Roman wall painting, and the theater. You look at the restored view at the top, of a typical theater facade as we think it would've looked, a theater stage building, as we think it would have looked early on, possibly made out of wood again rather than stone. You can see it has a central section with a pediment and then it has two wings and we see the same scheme here. The central section which is called technically a regia in theater architecture, r-e-g-i-a, and then two wings that are technically called hospitalia, h-o-s-p-i-t-a-l-i-a; hospitalia. So this tripartite scheme of a Roman theater. And if, if that is lost on us, note that there are masks, one on either side, theatrical masks that also give us a hint that we are looking at a theater set. Here's a more vivid view of one of the walls, where you can see that tripartite type division into central section and two wings. You can see the masks and you can see a view into some sort of landscape. The sky is no longer blue, it's white, but it does continue back beyond, behind the architecture. So you get the sense that you're being beckoned into. There's no, in fact there's no barrier here at all. The wall is gone here. There's no gateway. You can walk right in to this. What is this? There's no blue sky, so it doesn't look as real as the others did. It's not the sort of thing that might have been right outside your window, of a house. It's some kind of sacred landscape, some kind of strange, sacred landscape with a curved colonnade, with a tree, and with a very phallic looking shrine here in the center, some kind of sacred space. We call these sacro-idyllic landscapes, sort of idyllic and sacred at the same time that you're being beckoned into to explore. Again, this is a stage set of some sort? Or is it something else? Is it something that makes religious connot-, has religious connotations. The other interesting thing [COUGH] about the room of the masks in the House of Augustus is that some scholars have claimed that, although it is usually said that one-point linear perspective, in which all lines converge at a single point in the distance, was created in the, was invented in the Renaissance, a case can be made that it was invented in Roman times. And if, if it happened, it happened here in this house where-- and, and scholars, even of the Renaissance, have studied the way in which these points converge in this painting all the way to a point at the end. So if that's true, the Romans may have done that, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps on purpose. They were very interested in perspective. I'll say a bit more about that in a moment. But if they invented it here, they quickly rejected it, as we're going to see, in next week's lecture. Just a couple of details, the mask and the beautiful way in which this very talented artist probably one of the best artists of the day, has build up this mask out of, out of, out of you know, touches of gray and white and black, an extraordinary thing. And then again I really do urge you to, to look at these de, and look at these paintings in detail, because if you do you will be very rewarded. You'll see all kinds of strange creatures, like winged figures, this very strange thing lurking up there. Is that vegetal? Is it animal? Is it human? What is that? These wonderful, what look like swans, golden swans that decorate this. When you look very close, you can see there's a figural frieze here. And look at that wonderful representation of the fruit or vegetables in a bowl, a bowl that is represented so magnificently and translucently by the artist. In the, in the maybe three minutes or so that remain, I want to show you one last painting. And it's a very special painting indeed, and I think it ties together everything that we've been talking about today. It is a painting from, not the House of Livia, where there are some preserved paintings, we're not going to look at those. But from a villa of Livia, located north of Rome at a place called Prima Porta, the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta. And it is the, in a sense, the ultimate example and the very last gasp of Second Style Roman wall painting. The villa was put up in 30 to 25 B.C., a barrel-vaulted room was decorated with this gardenscape. Now as you look at this, you'd probably say to me, that's, doesn't look like anything we've looked at today. There's no architecture there, there's no remnants of a First Style wall. There are no projecting columns. There are no black curtains and so on and so forth. It's very different from anything we've seen. But we categorize this as a Second Style wall. Why do we do that? Because there's a division between where we stand as spectator and the space that lies beyond the fence. There is a fence, divides our space from the space that lies outside, but it's a very, very, very delicate fence. A white, kind of lattice fence, not unlike one we saw in the Samnite house on the second story. We don't have columns, we have trees, a different kind of upright here. But what connects this to the Second Style is that it is the ultimate example of a Roman painting as a panoramic picture window. This is what, this was the, this is what they hope you would see when you looked out of the rooms of your house, of your great bay window of the Villa of Mysteries. You didn't see the sea, you would see some glorious landscape, out gardenscape, out aside of your window, with beautiful trees. This is, if you look at these with care you will see that this is an artist who understood nature and observed it, who knew the difference. Between, among the fruits that would be on trees like this, they're fruit trees here, who knew, who had a sense of the way in which birds would alight on a leaf if they were headed toward one. Who had a sense of the way in which leaves would rustle in the breeze, who had a sense of the way in which light can fall differently on a leaf, so that you sometimes see the lighted side, or the side in shadow. This is an artist who has really observed nature and has depicted what he saw. And here are a couple of details where you can see that very well, of this tree. You see what I mean by some leaves cast in shadow, some leaves have light shining on them. You get a sense of the breeze. You get this wonderful, wonderful way on which this black bird alights on the edge of a leaf. This bird over here, is surveying this piece of fruit, deciding whether he wants to peck it or not. This is very sophisticated stuff. And, you can also see, if you explore this, this painting a bit more, that it has, that it partakes of what we call today atmospheric perspective, not one point perspective, but atmospheric perspective. What is atmospheric perspective? If you look at this carefully you will see that all of the items that are in, all the objects that are in the foreground have very distinct outlines. Whereas those in the middle ground are a little fuzzier, and those way in the background are fuzzier still. And there're actually probably could barely see them but they're actually mountains in the distance. And those mountains in the distance are so fuzzy, and their silhouette that you can barely see them. But you get this sense of space, of moving back because of this use of atmospheric perspective. So this, the ultimate, Roman painting, Second Style. The Roman painting, as panorama, that again corresponds so well, to all the discussions we've been having in the last couple of lectures of this move towards increased vista. Increased panorama, both in painting and also in architecture. Thanks guys.
