Villa of Agrippa Postumus
Agrippa Postumus, a grandson of the Emperor Augustus, had a villa on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, which was buried in the eruption of 79 AD.
[2] The frescoes come from various cubicula, or bedrooms that served as places of sociability and business, along the villa's southern hallway that overlooks the bay of Naples.
is commonly accepted as the date of the cubicula's decorations since Tuberones and Fabius, two of the names inscribed on this tile, were consuls in 11 BC.
[10] While Julia is often seen as the patron of the cubicula's paintings, Elfriede Knauer presents the possibility that Agrippa commissioned the rooms’ decorations while he was governing in the eastern Roman provinces.
[17] A tile in the slave quarters dates it to 2 BC,[18] the year of Julia's exile and when an overseer would have taken over the villa from the imperial family.
[23] Located at the east end of the hallway, the Black Room, cubiculum 15, had a doorway in the south wall leading to a terrace with a view of the sea.
Portrait medallions of either Agrippa and another male member of the imperial family or Julia and Livia sit at the top of the columns supporting the pavilion's roof.
[26] In between the pavilion's columns floats a sacro-idyllic landscape of a small building with a porch decorated with garlands, grapes, and patrea.
In the middle of each candelabra, two swans, symbols of Apollo, Augustus's patron god, hold fillets in their beaks while perching on protruding spirals.
[28] At the top of each candelabra is a yellow framed picture, or pinakes, of Egyptian deities, such as Isis, and symbols of the crocodile god Sobek, Hathor, or Apis, with leaders worshipping them.
[29] The pinakes on the right candelabrum show a ruler kneeling and offering an olive branch, a symbol of peace, to the shrine of Amubis.
Matteo Della Corte's commissioned drawings of the frescoes show that the Sobek icons were mirrored, suggesting that a pattern-book was used in the creation of the Egyptian figures.
The landscape on the eastern wall contains a gate supporting a statue, a porch decorated with a goat's head, a woman and child entering the area, and a shepherd.
Della Corte's plan of the villa showed nine white hexagons that created a 92 centimeter square in the center of the floor.
[35] Black tesserae and white mosaic tiles support the idea that this room was used as a triclinia for dining and entertainment purposes.
The fresco on the northern wall is a large sacro-idyllic landscape of a tomb with an altar and statue of a seated deity floating on a white background.
[40] The western landscape contains a tree surrounded by four columns, a tetrastylon, decorated with a goat's head, a fountain, three statues, and a temple with rocks in the background.
[44] Above the candelabra is a yellow frieze containing Egyptian-themed images, including deities, griffins, and comic masks, in small black-background shapes.
