The style is rich in meanings, all of them playing within the purely traditional framework of augural law, of priestly ritual, of the ius imaginum — besides Augustus, only Agrippa and Appuleius Saturninus, as adult relatives and holders of curule magistracies, have a recognizable likeness on the southern frieze of the altar — and of the will of the paterfamilias. The style tries to underline the quality and unity of these diverse messages with the variety of languages and the generally Classicizing patina. The tiny frieze crowning the altar, which depicts the procession of the annual sacrum composed of the colleges of priests and Vestals with their appropriate victims, has however a didactic tone that has very little classicizing about it, being rather a faithful transcription of the lex arae and thus bound to traditional forms of thought and expression. Composed of single figures in fairly high relief, this style reappears in the small friezes on triumphal arches, such as those of Titus in Rome and of Trajan at Beneventum, and it is the most susceptible to 'plebeian involutions', of which the style of the small frieze on the arch of Constantine is but the culmination. This level of discourse necessarily simplifies and rejects all tendencies of Hellenistic embellishment, but it co-exists with the loftier level of Classicizing abstraction in the great frieze of the procession, where the elimination of any reference to space and dme (a function of the non-realistic character of the representation) corresponds to the fully neoclassical rendering of the faces and postures of the participants in the procession and the rite. A comparison is often made with the frieze on the Parthenon but this refers in a highly idealizing way to the subject-matter of the Ara Pacis: the style of the monument depends rather on late Hellenistic experiments of a classicizing nature, beginning with the great frieze on the altar at Pergamum. This distinction helps us to understand the more decidedly Hellenistic character of the minor panels, born of the same tradition (we can compare them with the Telephos frieze on the Pergamene altar), in which it is much easier to observe the composite nature of the representation, consisting of classicizing figures set against an idyllic Hellenistic landscape. The slight but perceptible difference of style between panels and processional frieze is closely tied to the diversity of genres in the two parts: in the frieze courtly, solemn, timeless and rhetorical in the grand style, but in the panels, seemingly contradictory but callimachean in flavour, that is, Classicizing and pathetic at the same time, as well as homerizing and grandiose in the style of the Hellenistic epyllion. In any case, these diverse stylistic realities, all of them part of the same monument and the same workshop, are perfectly understandable in terms of a neo-Attic culture — one whose strong propensity for elaborate toreutic models is so evident in the frieze of acanthus - a culture acclimatized for some time in Rome and now able to express in accomplished form the regime culture which was now fully functioning in the last decade of the first century в.с.
Painting, however, is even more revealing of the profound changes that occurred in the middle years of the Augustan Principate. The origins of the extremely baroque Second Style can be fixed chronologically at the turn of the second to the first century B.C., and ideologically in the yearning for the impressive spaces and the luxury of decor of late Hellenistic royal palaces. The years of Caesar's brief and brilliant career saw the highest level of luxuria expressed by the extraordinary painted architectures, conceived and executed by expert scene-painters on the walls of patrician town residences or of aristocratic villas in Latium and Campania. The decorations of the Roman house on the Esquiline (70 в.с.),46 and in the villas of the Mysteries (60 в.с.),47 at Boscoreale (60-50 в.с.),48 and at Oplontis (50 в.с.),49 count among the most significant examples of the high level of quality of this painting, which must be
« P. H. von Blanckenhagen, MDAl(R) 70 (1965) io6ff; Gallina 1964 (f 580).
Editioprinceps by A. Maiuri, La Villa dei Mislen (2nd edn, Rome, 1947).
48 B. Andreae, in Kaiser Augustus 1988 (f 443) 273fT.
4'' A. De Franciscis, PP 1973, 43 ĵff; id. in La regione sotterrata del Vesuvio (Naples, 1982) 907^ (with earlier bibliography).
assigned to the period between 70 and 50 B.C., linked as it is to the baroque in all the other figurative arts between Sulla and Caesar.[1141]Decorative painting under the Second Triumvirate and in the early years of the reign of Augustus shows the obvious signs of a crisis in this baroque. Augustus' house on the Palatine,[1142] decorated after he acquired the property from the orator Hortensius in 36, is a precious document of that crisis and, more generally, of figurative art in the decade before Octavian assumed the title of Augustus. One of the two libraries of the domus is marked by a very traditional wall in an austere Second Style: without 'open walls', without effects or perspective, and without copies of famous classical paintings, it essentially offers only a false marble incrustation rendered illusionistically in paint. Other areas, such as the ramp connecting the domus with the temple of Palatine Apollo, the great tetrastyle hall (oecus), or the Room of the Garlands, show that 'open walls' are confined to the upper parts of the walls. This lesser austerity in decoration, compared to that of the library, indicates the less 'official' character of these rooms. But the 'open wall' with a perspective view and the loss of structural consistency in the decoration of one of the two small rooms (no. 11) to the sides of the reception hall (no. 10), and likewise the insertion of the central painting in bedroom no. 14, reveal the even more private character of these areas. This is most noticeable in the small and extremely private annexe (diaeta, no. 7) at the end of the north-west portico of the peristyle, where we find the greatest novelty of the time, a room entirely decorated with a monochrome black background, festoons hanging from small, non-architectural pillars and from very slender candelabras, and idyllic sacred landscapes painted in yellow colour, superimposed: technically we have already reached the Third Style, as in the Black Room in the House of the Farnesina a decade later. It is thus easy to understand why Vitruvius, wridng in this very period before 27, penned his invective (vn.5.3) against just such effronteries, which threatened the physical consistency of painted buildings and with it the informing principle of Classical representation, mimesis, the imitation of reality.