American Academy in Rome - Role Models Abstract

The Philological, the Folkloric, and the Site-specific:
Three Models for Decoding Classical Visual Representation

John R. Clarke

This paper analyses and critiques three models for unravelling the meaning of ancient visual representation by focusing on a single wall painting. It represents an ass mounting a lion and was found at Pompeii in the 1850s. The painting is particularly hard to 'decode' for several reasons. It decorated the facade of a humble building, perhaps a tavern, gaming house, or house of prostitution. Yet no known paintings from bordellos portray sex between animals; they always show human intercourse. What is more, the fact that a Victory crowns the lion adds an agonistic note, implying that the ass has won some sort of contest.

I will examine the three major interpretations of this image to characterise patterns of scholarly habits in regard to excavated Roman imagery. The earliest approaches to the image were philological. They sought out classical texts that 'explained' the image. Philology saw in the fresco the metaphorical - and satirical ¾ enactment of Actium, a famous historical event: Augustus, the donkey, overcoming Anthony, the lion. Folkloric interpretations followed. Using the methodology of structuralism, they looked into folk tales and fables, from Aesop to ancient Ur, that represented interactions between asses and lions. The most recent approach, the site-specific, handles the image in relation to the function of the building, the other imagery found with it, and patterns in the decoration of facades at Pompeii.

Each of these approaches reveals changing assumptions of modern scholarship about what we can extract from ancient visual representations. Philological interpretations assume a 'trickle-down' model: they assume that an historical event, recorded in elite texts, was uppermost in the minds of ordinary Pompeians and therefore gave them a key to the ass-lion fresco. Folkloric approaches attempt to connect the specific Pompeian image with a repository of pan-Mediterranean folk tales. Site-specific accounts frame the painting's meaning in functional terms and in the context of what we have learned about the visual culture of ancient Pompeians in the mid-first century A.D.

Annie Laurie Howard Regents Professor of Fine Arts, Department of Art & Art History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-0337.

j.clarke@mail.utexas.edu