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Retrieving the Decorative
Program of Villa A (‘of Poppaea’) at
Oplontis (Torre Annunziata, Italy):
How Orphaned Fragments Find a
Home in the Virtual-Reality
3D Model
John R. Clarke
Abstract
Digital reconstruction has reclaimed four Second-Style decorations of
Villa A. In processing hundreds of fragments left in storage because they
did not fit into what was known of existing walls, we discovered that a
group of large fragments defined an ionic upper zone of atrium 5, and
that another group belonged to the upper zone of the unexcavated west
wall of oecus 15. Archival photographs and drawings, rather than physical fragments, guided digital reconstruction of the nearly destroyed painting in the tympanum of cubiculum 15 and the lost portion of the west
wall of triclinium 14. Placing these digitally restored paintings into our
navigable 3D model allows scholarly study of the part these decorations
played in the decorative ensembles of the Villa.
Since 2008, much of my work on Villa A has been
aimed at putting in order the locked rooms around the slave’s
peristyle (32); over the course of forty years, these rooms (28,
29, 35, 43, 44), originally conceived as secure lockups for
fragments of wall painting and excavation finds, accumulated
masses of modern materials that got intermixed with the
ancient remains. After removing tons of modern debris, we
were able clean, study, and catalogue thousands of fragments
of painting and stucco. These are the “orphaned fragments”
stored in Villa A.
In terms of their physical state, there are two basic kinds
of fragments: ones that have been consolidated and ones
that have received no treatment. In the 1960s and 1970s, the
process of consolidation was primitive by modern standards
John R. Clarke
Fig. 1. Oplontis Villa A, atrium
5, east wall, 1968 (photo
Stanley Jashemski 45_24_68.
Jashemski Archives, University
of Maryland).
au: correct?
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of conservation. Workmen placed the fragment face down a
table. They cut down the ancient plaster backing to create a
regular surface, then put down galvanized steel wire for reinforcement and applied modern cement to build a new backing. They also formed the wire into loops to serve as hooks
for hanging the fragment on the reconstructed wall. Once the
fragments from a room were consolidated in this way, the restorers would cement them into the reconstructed wall—presumably in the right position. To aid in this process, restorers
traced the outlines of the decorative scheme in the modern
cement to guide the positioning of the fragments.
Archival photographs provide a sense of how far-reaching
this process was. A photograph from the Wilhelmina Jashemski taken by her husband, Stanley, in the summer of 1968,
shows the east wall of the atrium (fig. 1). The south half of
that wall had collapsed. By 1970, that wall had been reconstructed using blocks of modern tufa (fig. 2). The wall paintings a tourist sees today were salvaged from the debris of that
collapse, consolidated, and hung on this reconstructed wall.
Although the west wall of the atrium remained standing
after excavation, a rare photograph shot in 1966 shows what
was visible just after excavations began. Only the tops of the
wall have been unearthed (fig. 3). Comparison of this photo
with one showing the current state of the wall (fig. 4) reveals
The Decorative Program of Villa A at Oplontis
that two fragments were found in the volcanic debris and
later inserted into the reconstructed wall.
It turns out that many Second-Style fragments belonging
to the atrium came to light after reconstruction, some of them
documented in a photograph dated December 1973 before
being consigned to the confusion of the storage rooms around
the slaves’ peristyle and only to be rediscovered, measured,
and photographed by the Oplontis Project in 2008. One
of the project architects, Timothy Liddell, worked with the
puzzle presented by these fragments. Using Photoshop and
Illustrator, he was able to place a number of the orphaned
fragments into a plausible scheme that fits with the architectural perspectives of the standing wall. On the right side of
the west wall, there are the faint remains of a column base.
Since the only column-capital among the orphaned atrium
fragments is Ionic, Liddell hypothesized an Ionic upper order. The pieces fit quite well, but the exact height of the lost
Ionic columns must remain speculative (fig. 5). Liddell’s reconstruction is deliberately quite conservative.
Martin Blazeby, our partner in King’s Visualisation Lab at
King’s College, London, took Liddell’s Ionic upper story and
elaborated it on the basis of the other mature Second-Style
schemes that he has studied (fig. 6). One can argue the prob-
Fig. 2. Oplontis Villa A, atrium
5, east wall, 1970 (photo
Archivio Fotografico,
Soprintendenza Archeologica
di Pompei [henceforth SAP]
A3356).
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John R. Clarke
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The Decorative Program of Villa A at Oplontis
Fig. 3 (opposite, top). Oplontis
Villa A, atrium 5, west wall,
1966 (photo SAP De Franciscis
9.397).
Fig. 4 (opposite bottom).
Oplontis Villa A, atrium 5,
west wall, 2009 (photo Paul
Bardagjy).
Fig. 5 (left). Oplontis Villa A,
atrium 5, west wall. Reconstruction (drawing Timothy
Liddell).
ability of various elements, but taken as a whole Blazeby’s reconstruction helps us imagine—above all—the extraordinary
height of the atrium’s decoration—part and parcel of the regal allusions typical of the mature Second Style.1
When Liddell completed his work on the west wall of
atrium 5, several fragments were left over that did not fit
into his reconstruction. We catalogued them, hoping that we
would find a place where they might fit someday. It was only
in May of 2013 that I discovered the last hoard of orphaned
Fig. 6 (below). Oplontis Villa A,
atrium 5, west wall. Reconstruction (Martin Blazeby).
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Fig. 7. Oplontis Villa A, oecus
15, east wall (reconstruction
Timothy Liddell, with queries).
John R. Clarke
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The Decorative Program of Villa A at Oplontis
fragments, hidden under a tower of crates in another storage room. They presented an enigma. When assembled, the
pieces presented redundant elements belonging to oecus 15.
The work of placing these fragments began by photographing all the fragments to scale, then manually arranging them
on the floor, with a blowup image of the existing east wall
of oecus 15 as a guide. It soon became clear that the redundant elements could not fit on the east wall of the room—the
Fig. 8. Oplontis, Villa A,
cubiculum 11, north alcove,
tympanum, 2009 (photo Paul
Bardagjy).
Fig. 9. Oplontis, Villa A,
cubiculum 11, north alcove,
tympanum, 1966 (photo SAP
DeFranciscis 9.82).
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John R. Clarke
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only wall fully uncovered by the excavations. This wall is quite
impressive, the tallest Second Style decoration in the Villa,
at nearly 6 m. Although a tunnel in the southwest corner of
the room identified the southwest corner the west wall, the
remainder still lies buried under the modern street. It turns
out that this group of new fragments—along with several
that Liddell could not fit into the atrium reconstruction—
belonged to the upper zone of this unexcavated west wall. It
is probable that the earthquakes that detached and flipped
the upper two-thirds of the east wall must have dislodged the
fragments of the west wall, mixing them with volcanic debris.
Although excavators saved them and had some of them consolidated, they never found their way into the reconstruction
of oecus 15 because there was no wall to hang them on.
Since we know that the west wall of oecus 15 mirrored
the decoration of the existing east wall, we flipped the image
of the east wall and fit the new fragments into that scheme
(fig. 7). Our work proceeded electronically from this point
on, with Liddell proposing the positioning of the fragments
in digital form. Queries in text boxes allowed team members
to comment on the reconstruction directly. Images of fragments that have not found a home appear in the box at the
lower right. Despite the redundancies between the two walls,
several of the fragments open new avenues of research. The
peopled frieze, executed in cinnabar red and belonging to a
beam connecting two columns in the upper part of the wall,
preserves more details than its twin on the east wall, and part
of a tall rectangular shuttered painting invites comparison
with the pendant-shuttered paintings resting on beams on
the east wall.
In addition to our work with physical fragments, we have
had some success with digital reconstruction based on archival drawings and photographs. Shortly after its discovery in
1966, the painting in the north tympanum of cubiculum 11
faded drastically, with no record of its original appearance
other than a schematic sketch (fig. 8). In the summer of 2008,
two black-and-white photographs, shot in 1967, surfaced in
the archives of the Superintendency of Pompeii (fig. 9). Martin Blazeby undertook the painstaking task of reconstructing the painting in color and inserting it into the Oplontis
Project’s 3D Model of Villa A (fig. 10). It is a unique SecondStyle harborscape, the only preserved example of the use of
a landscape to decorate a tympanum in the mature Second
The Decorative Program of Villa A at Oplontis
Style. Ivo van der Graaff ’s study of this image demonstrates
the meanings that a fortified harbor might have conveyed to
a contemporary viewer.2 What is more, integration of the
tympanum painting with the other decorations, including the
stuccoes and mosaic carpets, gives us a clearer picture of the
ample repertory of architectural perspectives, figural motifs,
and landscapes at the command of the painters of Boscoreale workshop—authors of at least two of the Second Style
rooms in the Villa.3
As in cubiculum 11, in triclinium 14 it was a combination of archival photographs and drawings that allowed Blazeby to restore missing elements. A photograph shot in 1966
provides a sense of the chaotic situation the workers faced
Fig. 10. Oplontis, Villa A,
cubiculum 11, north alcove,
tympanum (reconstruction
Martin Blazeby).
au: insert “the” here?
Fig. 11. Oplontis, Villa A, oecus
15, east wall, with overturned
portion showing west wall
of triclinium 14, 1966 (SAP
B1284).
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John R. Clarke
Fig. 12. Oplontis, Villa A,
triclinium 14, west wall (reconstruction drawing, Ciro Iorio.
SAP P1979).
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(fig. 11). The lower portion of the east wall oecus 15 is still
standing, so that one can recognize the image of the tragic
mask and just the head of one of the famous Oplontis peacocks sitting on a ledge. But at the bottom of the photograph
appears the image of a goddess in her circular shrine from
the opposite side of this wall—a piece of the west wall of triclinium 14 overturned by the cataclysm.
Fortunately, a conscientious draftsperson, Ciro Iorio, recorded these fragments before they were lost forever in the
failed attempts to recompose them and reattach them to the
reconstructed wall (fig. 12). Today the entire upper left quadrant depicted in Iorio’s drawing is lost, including the frieze
decoration consisting of shields and armor, the ornate capital
at the top of the large pier that runs from floor to frieze, as
well as the imago clipeata to the left of the goddess in her circular shrine (fig. 13). Blazeby’s digital reconstruction recovers these features and—as is the case with cubiculum 11—it
allows us to understand better how the decorative ensemble
shifts from anteroom to dining area (fig. 14).
Putting these digital reconstructions into a 3D model enhances their scholarly value, far surpassing the publication
of reconstructions in traditional print media. Whereas the
graphic conventions inherent in print publication prevent
scholars from testing the effects of decorative schemes in a
given space, in the digital model, a user can move, virtually,
through the spaces to test the kinesthetic effects of the deco-
The Decorative Program of Villa A at Oplontis
rative ensemble. Furthermore, he or she can study the decorative ensembles, toggling between actual and reconstructed
states and viewing them under varying light conditions. Finally, digital modeling allows changes and additions to hypothetical reconstructions that are impossible both with on-site,
physical reconstruction as well as print publication.
Fig. 13. Oplontis, Villa A,
triclinium 14, west wall actual
state (photo Paul Bardagjy).
University of Texas at Austin
j.clarke@austin.utexas.edu
Fig. 14. Oplontis, Villa A, triclinium 14, west wall, restored
(screenshot from 3D model).
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John R. Clarke
Notes
See Clarke 1991, 47–49, nn. 33–35.
Van der Graaff, forthcoming.
3
Clarke 2013, 2:204–8.
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2
Works Cited
Clarke, J.R. 1991. The Houses of Roman Italy, 100 B.C.–A.D. 250:
Ritual, Space, and Decoration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2013. “Sketching and Scaling in the Second-Style Frescoes
of Oplontis and Bosocreale.” In La villa romaine de Boscoreale, edited by A. Barbet and A. Verbanck-Piérard, 2:00–
00. Arles: Éditions Errance.
van der Graaff, I. Forthcoming. “The Recovered Tympanum of Cubiculum 11 at Villa A (“of Poppaea”) Oplontis (Torre Annunziata, Italy): A New Document for the Study of City
Walls.” In Oplontis Villa A (“of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy. Vol. 2, Decorative Ensembles: Paintings, Stucco, Pavements, Sculpture, edited by J.R. Clarke and N.K. Muntasser,
00–00. New York: ACLS Humanities E-Book Series.
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