Art: Phoenix in Campania

GREAT art is rising like a bright phoenix from the grey ashes around Mt. Vesuvius.

The world’s greatest painters, according to the writers of ancient Greece and Rome, were Greeks—Polygnotus, Zeuxis, Parrhasius and Apelles. But not a single picture from the hands of these legendary masters survives. To imagine what Greek painting looked like, scholars study the Roman art of Campania, the ancient resort area centering on Pompeii. The artists who decorated Campania’s villas, inns and brothels drew their inspiration mainly from the Greek tradition, and when Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., their art was packed in stones and ashes and preserved. For more than 200 years, archaeologists have been intermittently digging this art from its natural storage vault.

The man chiefly responsible for the world’s new interest in Campanian painting is a stubby, bespectacled archaeologist named Amedeo Maiuri, curator of the Naples Museum. Maiuri is in the midst of a new long-range program for excavating Pompeii and other Campanian towns: Baiae, Stabiae and Herculaneum (TIME, Oct. 13 et seq.). His eloquent, magnificently illustrated new book (Roman Painting, Skira; $15) is a fascinating guide to an almost lost world.

Dances & Floggings. Maiuri begins his book with the Apulian predecessors of Campanian artists, who made tombs alive with pictures. Describing the chorus of mourning women engaged in a ritual dance (opposite page, bottom), he says: “Every detail—mantles uniformly drawn up over the head, locked hands, forward-straining bodies, overlapping garments—contributes to suggest the swaying movement of an interminable dance, circling the tomb forever. Indeed, the effect on the beholder is almost one of dizziness.”

When painting in Italy emerged from the silence of the tomb, it did not always lose its solemnity. Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries contains an awesome, scene-by-scene illustration of a Dionysian rite, painted between 31 B.C. and 14 A.D. The kneeling girl (opposite, top) is half-fainting from the blows of a lash. The matron on whom she leans seems to be asking the unseen punisher to stop, while the naked dancer appears to beat time with her cymbals to the swing of the whip. The fourth figure holds a thyrsus, a classical fertility symbol. “Such indeed was the rite,” says Maiuri, “at once physical and symbolic, of purification in all times and places of the ancient world.” The painting itself is as convincingly physical as anything up to the time of Giotto. Its volcanic fusion of austerity with sensuality makes the mural a disturbing monument to paganism.

Echoes & Sketches. Toward the end, Campanian painting gracefully declined. Such single-figure frescoes as the Diana and Primavera (top, following page) would have delighted Botticelli (or else made him green with envy) and they are in what must have been the great Greek tradition. Yet they are merely decorative echoes, compared with the sounding depths of the Villa of Mysteries.

The painter who amused himself by imagining the Pygmies of the upper Nile (opposite page, bottom) broke with tradition. Like many late Pompeian artists, he found a sketchy, exaggerated, caricaturing approach best suited to his age. His somewhat bloodthirsty and hurried cartoon seems remarkably contemporary in the 20th century — it might almost be mistaken for a panel from a. comic strip. The similarity is probably no accident. Things were speeding up around Pompeii. Even resort life was getting pretty hectic. Old standards were being abandoned, the new was hastily sought, and there was a sense of permanent danger in the air. The gods, speaking through Mt. Vesuvius, had begun to grumble.