Viewing, Desiring, Believing: confronting the divine in a Pompeian house

Abstract

This paper explores the interrelationships between a set of Pompeian wall‐paintings of the first century AD. Three mythological scenes inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses are arranged around a portico leading to a chamber decorated with imagery associated with the cult of Isis. The panels all depict a tragic meeting of desirous gazes, making them particularly receptive to a Lacanian reading, which explores the way in which each scene is triangulated with the male viewer, through the arousal of his own desire, and the scopic traps of illusionistic naturalism itself. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of naturalistic and religious modes of viewing collapses the categories of the secular and sacred, complicating the relationship between two supposedly different Greco‐Roman aesthetic traditions. The paper explores two potential readings – religious imagery as a ‘safe’ resting‐place for the potentially dangerous gaze, or a blurring of categories by which the sacred and secular are equally subject to that paranoia of the general gaze which imbued Imperial Roman society.

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