Letter from Pompeii: Mr. Synistor's Cubiculum

Source: San Diego Natural History Museum


When I was 9, my family moved to a city built on the slopes of a major active volcano in the Andes. Until then, I had lived my entire life in apartments on extremely flat terrain, so my siblings and I were excited at the prospect of living in a real house, with a yard nested amid mountains. The house had spectacular views. Maybe a bit too spectacular: the large window in my room opened out onto the volcano.

During the first few months, I had nightmares about the volcano erupting. At one point we children agreed that the national government had inserted a large concrete plug into the mouth of the crater, eliminating any chance of a major eruption. Nevertheless, those years of living at the foot of a volcano (which, incidentally, spewed a giant column of ash a few years later) left us with a life-long interest in all things volcanic. Among them: the story of Pompeii, the city buried alive under meters of ash and pumice by Mount Vesuvius' cataclysmic eruption in 79 AD and lost for 1700 years until its accidental discovery by workmen working on the foundation of a summer palace for the King of Naples.

The volcanic eruption that took so many lives preserved much of the town at the moment of its demise, not just the houses and artifacts but even its unlucky citizens -- their bodies, buried under the tonnes of ash, left behind spaces that, when injected with plaster, reproduced with poignant accuracy the very second of their deaths. As for their town, it remained remarkably intact. When I visited Pompeii as a teenager, I remember being struck by a perfectly preserved toilet -- a moment of levity in a somewhat morbid tour. Colorful frescoes and mosaic floors from the town's wealthy villas help to tell the everyday life of the city. There are, also, the vivid accounts of the city's destruction. Pliny the Younger, stationed across from the bay of Naples during the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, witnessed the event and attempted (unsuccessfully) to rescue his uncle from the disaster. Twenty years later, he recounted the tragedy in vivid language in a letter to the historian Tacitus (you can view the letter and read the transation here). All of these accounts of Pompeii's before and during the eruption help to make the site much more than an archaeological relic: a living dead city of sorts.

Some 1700 years later and a few thousand kilometers away, my father is in town here in New York, and we decide to visit the Metropolitan Museum. Last year, the museum reopened its Hellenic and Roman galleries after extensive renovations. The day is brisk and bright, so we head northwards to Central Park, where we walk along 5th avenue to the Met. The renovated gallery surrounds a soaring two-floor atrium with ornate columns supporting a skylight roof. Off to one side we find one of the exhibit highlights: a full cubiculum nocturnum, or bedroom, recovered and restored from a villa in Boscoreale, about a mile north of Pompeii, and also buried in 79 AD. At the time, the villa was owned by a (somewhat accurately named) P. Fannius Synistor, and seems to have served as a pastoral reserve of sorts. The villa was excavated along with Pompeii, and many of its treasures were auctioned off to museums abroad -- the Met bid and won the fresco walls of this room *designated Room M" on the blueprint of the villa as interpreted by archaeologists.

The walls of the cubiculum are covered with trompe l'oeil paintings done in the fresco technique. The three walls picture a different motif, with temple scenes, votive offerings, a tree-filled terrace, statuary, rotundas, and pylons, a glimpse of a townscapes -- all of this arranged to create the illution of greater spatial depth (there are nitid photos of the bedroom frescos here). At the rear of the room a vaulted ceiling creates a niche for the bed; the window has grills also excavated from the villa. (You can read more about the Boscoreale excavation -- as well as the sad dispersal of its treasures, here).



I look up the villa in Google Books and find a brief reference in Roger Ling's 1991 "Roman Painting". After stumbling on the architectural vocabulary (the first sentence of the paragraph reads: "The same ambiguity affects the caryatids supporting the modillions of the cornice in the west wall of the triclinium." Er, okay.) I find prose I can deciper: "the winged figure perched on a great disc in the fictive opening at the centre of the same wall... suggest a hazy boundary between real and surreal." From the passage and accompanying description of the cubiculum it seems that Mr. Synistor, or whomever commissioned the paintings, liked to mix realism with a healthy dose of fantasy -- and the same could be said of the Met gallery it now occupies, with its Doric columns and recessed lighting.