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Having had some lucky encounters with wall paintings from 1st century villas near Pompeii a few months ago, I've been pursuing some questions about this art, which seems to have evolved very rapidly during the Late Republic and reached some extreme elaboration during the decoration of Nero's Golden House. The art doesn't fit the schemes of Classical Art in any obvious way and I've found that Vitruvius (writing at about that time) seems to agree with me. Or so I found in J. Elsner's Art and the Roman Viewer (reviews at):
http://www.arlisna.org/artdoc/1996/may/05.pdf
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3284/is_199609/ai_n7982889
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1996/96.04.31.html
Anyway, according to Elsner, Vitruvius approved of the first two stylistic schemes where the viewer looks out of fake windows on the real walls and sees relatively complete landscapes: ie a completely fake world with a fake world in it. This does not disturb Vitruvius. What worries Vitruvius is what happens in the third and fourth styles, where the elements of what is fake don't stay in a simple and easy-to-read order. One can find landscapes without windows. They are just there on the wall. One can find images of things that ought to be in the room close to the wall, but these are reassembled in unlikely ways and even the parts of the parts are reassembled in such a way that the fluidity of motif that results in the specific style called "grotesque" (named for the servents quarters of Nero's Golden House which were explored during the High Renaissance resulting in the grotesque craze that swept the Western World until well into the 1530s so that it turns up for example in Winchester Cathedral on the outside of the reboxed remains of the mixed bones that were dug up there then during renovations).
So my question is: is it a slippery slope? Once forms become fluid...are you always bound for the grotesque or is that an Art Historical Illusion caused by the fact that Vasari wrote during High Mannerism and well before Winkelman supposedly invented Classical Art History while Vitruvius codeified what was Classical but excluded half of the styles of his own time?
http://www.arlisna.org/artdoc/1996/may/05.pdf
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3284/is_199609/ai_n7982889
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1996/96.04.31.html
Anyway, according to Elsner, Vitruvius approved of the first two stylistic schemes where the viewer looks out of fake windows on the real walls and sees relatively complete landscapes: ie a completely fake world with a fake world in it. This does not disturb Vitruvius. What worries Vitruvius is what happens in the third and fourth styles, where the elements of what is fake don't stay in a simple and easy-to-read order. One can find landscapes without windows. They are just there on the wall. One can find images of things that ought to be in the room close to the wall, but these are reassembled in unlikely ways and even the parts of the parts are reassembled in such a way that the fluidity of motif that results in the specific style called "grotesque" (named for the servents quarters of Nero's Golden House which were explored during the High Renaissance resulting in the grotesque craze that swept the Western World until well into the 1530s so that it turns up for example in Winchester Cathedral on the outside of the reboxed remains of the mixed bones that were dug up there then during renovations).
So my question is: is it a slippery slope? Once forms become fluid...are you always bound for the grotesque or is that an Art Historical Illusion caused by the fact that Vasari wrote during High Mannerism and well before Winkelman supposedly invented Classical Art History while Vitruvius codeified what was Classical but excluded half of the styles of his own time?