Pictorial space as a media phenomenon: the case of ‘Landscape’ in Romano-Campanian wall-painting

• Main Author: Nikolaus Dietrich
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques 2017-03-01
• Series: Cahiers Mondes Anciens
• Subjects: pictorial space; landscape; Attic vase-painting; Roman wall-painting
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/mondesanciens/1903

In his ground-breaking article “Perspektive als symbolische Form” Erwin Panofsky argued for the fundamental significance of modes of spatial depiction in the visual arts for cultural history. In line with Panofsky’s approach, changing modes of spatial depiction in Graeco-Roman art have been interpreted as indicators of cultural historical change too, as e.g. in Tonio Hölscher´s important works on changing images of war. This paper adopts a different approach. Differences in the modes of spatial depiction are explained as media phenomena responding to the specificities of picture-genres. Taking the very different treatments of ‘landscape’ in Attic vase-painting (treated as a contrasting comparandum) and in Romano-Campanian wall-painting as a case-study, my aim is to demonstrate how these differences correspond to the respective types of decoration, their specific requirements and their context: Athenian drinking vessels for the symposion and adorned walls as decorum of the Roman upper-class-house.