As to private architecture, innovations had already appeared in the culture of the late Republic, and the Augustan age added litde to what had already been developed, other than its own neo-classical taste in decoration. Large mosaic pavements in black and white, walls painted in
21 Documentation in E. Schmidt, Ant. Plastik 13 (1973); id. Gtscbichte der Karyatide (Wurzburg, 1982).
the Third Style, plain impluvia, and symmetric peristyles: these are the main contribudon of an age concerned with returning to normal all that was bizarre or baroque in the domesdc architecture of the late Republic.28 Much broader was the spectrum of funerary typology, which reflects better than any other aspect of the culture the fundamental stratification of society, the ambitions of social ascent, the unifying force of the principles of the court in artisdc culture.29 Columbaria (tombs with niches for funerary urns) begin to proliferate to meet the needs of the less affluent social classes, while the late republican model of the naiskos, or shrine, was replaced in the preferences of the middle and upper classes of society by the tomb set on a tall, austere, archaizing cylinder: the most celebrated examples of this are the tomb of Caecilia Metella at Rome and that of Munadus Plancus at Gaeta, and that colossal exemplum, the mausoleum of Augustus. This taste for the exodc also provides a chance to indulge in such oddities as egyptianizing tombs in the form of pyramids. Above all the link — one derived from the practices of Hellenistic dynasts - between tombs and suburban estates, gardens or villas, grew even stronger than it had been, showing that these pyramids were not oddities, but that they too are to be included within the framework, already noted, of the 'bourgeoisification' of the royal cultural models of late Hellenism, a process increasingly evident as one penetrates the maze of private culture.
Naturally all this exists in delicate balance with the classicizing tradition, even in sculpture in the round. The programme of sculptural decoration of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum30 may have been due (as appears more likely) to a great intellectual of the Caesarian age such as L. Ateius Praetextatus, working for the patrician Claudii Pulchri, or (as some prefer) it may have been created a little later for the Calpurnii Pisones. Either way, it draws from a vast range of sculptural traditions in order to realize an articulated representation of the ideology and the ethical models of the leaders of society in the years of the civil wars. The classicizing formulae, which reach their peak in the ideal coupling of the Doryphorus/Achilles of Polyclitus with the Amazon/Penthesilea of Phidias, pass from the prototypes of the high fifth century в.с. through the late-classical — Lysippus' Hermes in Repose comes to mind — to end with the Hellenistic, found in garden sculpture. The choice of the prototype to be copied, developed and re-echoed is directly linked to the
a There is no standard work on Augustan domestic architecture and the relationship between it and painted, marble and stucco decoration. See in the meantime D'Arms 1970 (e jo); P. Zanker, JDAI 94 (1979) 46off; Mielsch 1987 (f 302); Neudecker 1987 (f 513). Most interesting are the remarks of Leach 1982 (f 465).
Eisner 1986 (f 357); von Hesberg and Zanker 1987 (f 418).
M. R. Wojcik, Ann. Fae. Lett. Fibs. Perugia 16/17 (1978/79-1979/80) 359^ amplified in La villa dei Papiri ad ErcoLmo (Rome, 1986).
type of message which was intended: loftier and richer in ethical or political content, for sculptures copied from the Classical; lighter, more idyllic and epigrammatic, for works drawn from the Hellenistic repertory. Naturally in the public part of the house forms and messages are of a higher, Classicizing tone, while in the private area devoted to leisure the prevailing models are Hellenistic or at least escapist. The boundaries between these two levels are obviously very fluid, especially in houses, a fact which encouraged the mixing of genres and idioms in sculpture as well as in the other figurative arts.
The leading patrons called on the expertise of the neo-Attic masters, whom they bound to themselves as freedmen clients, as the above- mentioned case of the Cossutii shows. Already extensive under the late Republic, production expanded even further in order to furnish the town houses, country villas and suburban estates of the Roman aristocracy and the domi nobiles of Italy with candelabras, tables, seats, and neoclassical and archaizing reliefs.[1136] These too express in concrete form the same atmosphere of idyll and escape which pervades architecture and painting. But to the same craftsmen and the same workshops are owed the last creations of Hellenistic culture on Italian soil, such as the Athlete of Stephanos, one of the masters of the school of Pasiteles, and above all the copies - either in bronze, with the technique of moulds and of clay models, or in marble, with the technique based on the pointing process - of great Classical originals: these are the key to the decoration of public and private buildings, with all the weight of traditional meanings or of meanings symbolically revived within the Roman context.[1137]
Because of their talent for copying, these craftsmen had to contend with a series of operations of 'assembly' and 'disassembly' of their own creations. Particularly significant is the operation undergone by the 'Cavaspina', an epigrammatic sculpture which was certainly well known and is late Hellenistic in conception, as can be seen in the copy in London: all the same, in the bronze copy at Rome its head echoes the severe style.[1138] The technical ability to reproduce sculpture relatively easily, when joined with a widespread 'culture of artistic canons' (modelled on that of literary canons), forged the opportunity for a whole series of formal tropes: archaistic heads on Classicizing torsoes, or Hellenistic draperies on naked limbs in a Classical manner, are to be read as stylistic metaphors and transpositions meant to express variationes, rhetorical elegantiae which do not impair the content. In reality, as it is easy to see in Cicero's superficial remarks in commissioning the decoradon for his Tusculan villa,34 this new attitude prefigured that complete devaluation of the messages of the originals which would become typical from the later Julio-Claudian period. In that era copies of great Classical originals, such as the Mantua-type of Phidias' Apollo, are turned into banal lampstands in the townhouses of the Pompeian bourgeoisie, or reversed copies can be discovered facing each other to frame a doorway, as was the fate of the Pothos attributed to Scopas. From earlier symbolic 'translations' of their original content, the better to adapt it to the needs of the high Roman aristocracy, it is an imperceptible slide into pastiche and kitsch, a transformation which is also to be blamed on the gradual loss of coherence of formal values. The growing indifference to organic unity and stylistic coherence prefigures the indifference to content which would represent (with the exception of the great imperial complexes) the doctrine dominating decorations in the high empire.