Villa dei Papiri
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| Two carbonised scrolls from the Villa of the Papyrii at Herculaneum. |
Two studies are underway into the famous Villa dei Papiri (Villa of the Papyrii) at Portici, a short distance to the north of Herculaneum. The first is into the scrolls themselves, which were entirely carbonised by the heat (and possibly fire) that accompanied the destruction of the villa. The same photographic technique that has given us the bishop of Petra's correspondence from the burned church there, is being applied to these ancient discoveries. We eagerly await the results.
The second investigation concerns the statues for which the villa is equally famous. In fact, it was for the statues that the villa was first excavated. King Charles VII of Naples and Sicily was jealous of his neighbour, the Austrian Prince d'Eboeuf who, a few years previously, had dug up a number of ancient statues. King Charles hired a military engineer, Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre, to see what he could find on the royal property at Portici.
Alcubierre began work in 1738 and was successful in finding not only a satisfying number of statues, but also an inscription identifying the building in which they stood as the theatre of Herculaneum, a place which up till then had only been known from literary sources. The statues were duly installed in the royal palace and Alcubierre, his contract ended, returned to his military duties.
Twelve years later the manager of the royal estate decided that he needed a well and set some of his labourers to work digging one. Some 90' down the diggers hit a layer of stone that was unnaturally flat. Perhaps remembering Alcubierre's labours, they alerted the overseer and the stone was identified as marble. It is our good fortune that the overseer, also aware of the royal interest in "antiques", did not order them to break through the slabs but instead set them to widening the bottom of the shaft and thus revealed the fact that they had discovered a circular building about 21' in diameter.
More modern work at the site has identified this building as a pavilion that overlooked the sea a mere 30' below and would have been a cool and refreshing place in which the villa's inhabitants could go to enjoy the sea breeze on a hot day. Back in 1750, however, King Charles looked about for another military engineer with an interest in digging. He settled upon Karl Jacob Weber, a Swiss who had been assistant to Alcubierre.
Weber didn't even try to remove the 90' of soil above the floor; he simply dug tunnels, at random at first and then, when walls were discovered, along the walls. (The British military engineer Warren and others were to use the same technique in their explorations of Jerusalem in Turkish times.) To his eternal credit, Weber was sufficiently pedantic to keep exact records of where his tunnels went and what was found in them, even to the extent of drawing little pictures of the statues that turned up.
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| The Getty Museum at Malibu is a full-size reconstruction of the Villa of the Papyrii. |
Eventually a plan of a huge and luxurious villa emerged, so huge that even the American millionaire John Paul Getty was unable to improve upon it. His museum at Malibu is a copy of the Villa dei Papiri! Weber found that the circular pavilion was linked by a wall to a huge garden, some 345' long and 130' wide, whose main feature was an ornamental pond 217'x23'. At the far end of the garden a door led into a courtyard, also ornamented by a long, narrow pond, and beyond that lay a complex of rooms and chambers.
The villa was founded around 100 BC and, of course, destroyed in AD 79. We presume that it stayed in the ownership of the same wealthy family for that whole time. It is not only the size of the villa that shows the family's wealth, but the fact that whoever they were, they could afford to own over a thousand scrolls! They also had a collection of more than 80 sculptures, ranging from more-than-lifesize statues of Athena and other gods or heroes, to mere busts or herms (a bust on a square pillar).
Weber could do little more than clean the statues off and put them on display in the royal museum, (though in a few cases damaged bronze statues were repaired, somewhat clumsily, by melting down fragments of ancient bronze, casting a thick plate to fit the hole, and screwing it in place). Modern science allows a much more detailed examination.
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| Two athletes from the Villa of the Papyrii. It is not clear whether they are wrestlers or runners. |
For example, art critics have long pointed to two almost identical statues of young athletes and gone on about how they formed an integral part of the scheme in the garden. Profound conclusions have been drawn about why each statue was placed where it was and what the owners were trying to "say" by their choice of statue and position. It now turns out from a metallurgical study, that the two statues came from entirely different workshops and had no connection whatsoever with each other.
On the other hand, three busts of Greek rulers not only look similar, but we now know from an analysis of the trace elements that they were cast from the same batch of metal and almost certainly at the same time and probably represent a single order to the workshop.
We also now know that the owners of the villa were not above buying the occasional "pup"! A life-size bronze head of Apollo bore all the marks of great antiquity - damage to hair and eyes, for example - and there can be little doubt that it was purchased in the belief that it was an ancient Greek statue. Microscopic examination of this "damage", however, reveals that it was not the result of blows and breakages, but was deliberately cast - the statue was made with pseudo-damage! In other words, it was a best a copy and more likely a forgery.
Similar analysis has been done on the marble statues and this has confirmed that many of them are made of marble from Mt Pentelion on the outskirts of Athens, so they at least were genuinely Greek, even if they were not genuinely ancient. Weber and his royal patron believed that they had genuine Greek statues, but modern research is confident that they are Roman copies of Greek statues.
Perhaps the most interesting is the evidence that Henry Ford was not the inventor of the production line or assembly line, where identical parts are fitted to churn out identical products. Among the objects from the Villa dei Papiri are ten small bronze statues fitted with lead pipes and obviously intended for a fountain. They have interchangeable body parts - and even the alloys from which they are made are similar - indicating that somewhere there was a workshop producing hundreds of these things to supply the mass markets of the Roman Empire.
However whoever the owner of the villa was, he clearly was a man who believed that pigs could fly. One of the statues is a life-size piglet depicted in the act of leaping. The statue is finely balanced on the very tips of the piglet's hind trotters - or perhaps it was that the sculptor had yearnings to be an antique Damien Hearst, but unfortunately formaldehyde had not yet been invented.
