Shelley Hales, Bristol University

Creating a Canon from the Eclectic: Nineteenth Century Visions of the Roman House

Abstract

In the mid nineteenth century, both London and Paris housed attempts to reconstruct Pompeian houses – the Pompeii Court in the Sydenham Crystal Palace in 1854 and the Maison Pompéienne built for Prince Jerome Napoleon in 1856. Both houses claimed archaeological authenticity, based in turn on the House of the Tragic Poet and the Villa of Diomedes. Responses to the houses, crafted by both leading critics such as Gautier and the popular press, offer an insight into perceptions of Roman domestic space and its imaginative recollection both in the creative arts and in exhibition practice at a time when the excavations at Pompeii were about to reach new heights under Fiorelli.

One of the designers’ most difficult tasks was the distilling of an ideal from the complex decorations of the numerous houses already excavated at Pompeii, an ideal that no one house ever met. This search for canonical unity, drawing on individual elements from many houses, and suppression of what didn’t fit, was also played out in the narratives by which commentators tried to make sense of the resulting confections and of the remains themselves, which posed considerable difficulty in their apparent muddling of (what was considered to be) polarised standards of Roman and Greek aesthetics and morals.

But even as the creators and viewers of these houses attempted to pursue a canonical unity favoured by modern taste, they inevitably imposed on that unity the eclectism of their own aesthetic sense: for all the talk of pure Hellenism, the Maison Pompéienne merges visions of an indulgent Orientalism with its Pompeian architecture. These acts of reconstruction, created as a means of disseminating archaeological knowledge and classical taste, exposed most starkly the ways in which the present attempts to impose unity on the past, only to expose its own eclecticism.