Plaster Faces on Stage
Museums are usually thought of as the recipients of archaeological finds rather than the site of such discoveries. Unfortunately, museums have limited space in their display areas - especially since modern curatorial methods involve ever fewer items on display and ever larger information boards and space given over to fancy lighting effects. The result is that an increasing number of objects go straight from the excavator's spade to the museum's store room and never see the light of day again.
Cataloging systems are all very well, but a neatly typed entry on a 3x5" card, even if accompanied by a photograph, can hardly do justice to the reality of many ancient objects and so they tend to gradually disappear, buried under a tidal wave of new acquisitions in brown cardboard boxes and forgotten. Once the archaeologists who have discovered them have died, who is left to remember the wonder of holding an ancient spindle, an unremarkable object of everyday use, that was last held by gentle female hands four thousand years ago?
As a result it can sometimes happen that remarkable archaeological discoveries are made by digging in museum basements rather than on ancient sites! Such was the case when Maria Rosaria Borriello, curator at the Archaeological Museum in Naples, decided to investigate the basement of the Portici Palace of the Bourbon King Chales who "excavated" Pompeii in 1749.
Among the dusty crates and broken statuary that filled the dark room she spotted a theatrical mask and on impulse picked it up. The action revealed another mask and a little poking around produced a further thirteen, making fifteen in all, and all different.
You have probably seen the sort of thing I mean, depicted on theatre programmes or hung above the stage or the reception desk. Ancient Greek and Roman theatrical masks have become the standard icon for anything to do with the theatre, even though the use of such clumsy artefacts died out with the collapse of the Roman empire.
Travel writers and tourists rave on about the wonderful acoustics in ancient theatres - a common boast is that the speaker stood on the stage and spoke in a whisper that was clearly audible to his harassed-looking wife who had been dispatched to climb to the topmost row of seating. (No one has ever submitted the said wife to a lie-detector as to whether she did indeed hear her husband as clearly as he claims.) One cannot help but wonder what the effect on the acoustics would be to have the same theatre full of sound-absorbing bodies, all fidgetting, whispering and cracking nuts.
However acoustics aside, the semicircle of seats rising high into the air meant that a large proportion of the theatre patrons were sufficiently far from the stage that a raised eyebrow, a sardonic smile or a slight movement of the hand - all of which betray the villain of the piece - would have gone totally unnoticed. Even for those closer to the stage, the dim oil lamps that were all the ancient world could offer in the way of lighting after dark, meant that the raised eyebrow etc would have been barely - if at all - visible.
The solution adopted was to give the actors large masks to wear whose stylised and exaggerated features indicated to the audience whether the character was a villain or a comic, an offended father or an outraged damsel. The disadvantage of totally immobile features was outweighed by the advantage that the character could be recognised by patrons in the topmost row of seats who were thus primed to hear simpering platitudes or threatening growls from the damsel or the villain.
The only problem was that the masks discovered by Ms Borriello were made of heavy plaster and an actor placing one on his head for any length of time would infallibly end up with a crick in his neck. In addition, any lines he spoke would be rendered inaudible by the fact that the mouth, usually gaping open, was sealed shut with a flat layer of plaster.
These curious features lead Ms Borriello to conclude that the masks she found were not intended to be worn. Rather, they were the templates over which the ancient theatrical props producer would build the real mask out of something light like papyrus-maché. The mouths, solid in the template, would be open in the actual mask.
Curiously, two of the masks have letters scratched into the white panels where the mouths should be. On one the letters, although visible, are indecipherable, but on the other the word "Buco" is clearly visible. This could, of course, be short for "bucca" or mouth, but unless Roman theatrical apprentices were more than usually thick, labelling the mouth "mouth" is on a par with those idiots who stick warning notices on packets of salted peanutes saying "Danger! May contain nuts!"
It is more likely that the words refer to the characters that the masks were intended to represent, in which case "Buco" may well be a misspelling of "Bucco", the name of one of the standard characters in a type of play known as fibula Atellana which were highly popular from the 4th century BC through to the 1st century BC.
Based on rural life and country characters, these plays were really short skits that relied heavily on improvised dialogue, lots of bawdy jokes, knock-about humour and farcical situations. In a typical play a woman named Vesta is entertaining a lover in bed when footsteps without lead her to cry "Heavens! My husband!"
The lover dives under the bed but the newcomer proves to be another lover, who is welcomed by Vesta but just as the pair are turning to the matter in hand there are more footsteps and the second lover dives under the bed. When, finally, there is no more room under the bed the husband actually appears, discovers a foot sticking out and calls for the police, whereupon the platoon of lovers emerge, the last one out crowns the husband with a chamber pot and all exit stage left to make way for the next skit.
We may wonder at the effectiveness of such theatrical props, but just consider how much time would be saved if only the characters in "Big Brother" could be issued with such masks. We would be able immediately to identify the villain, the empty-headed blonde who will sleep with anyone, and the unemployed cross-dresser whose sole function on the set is to annoy the heck out of everyone else. We could pick the winner in the first ten minutes and then go off and watch something more interesting on another channel and leave the collection of sad but carefully selected misfits to carry on their antics as they please.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
