Ostia’s Museum

I find it strangely impossible to teach and look with my own research eyes. Like even in this museum I didn’t take a single picture of some of my favorite reliefs like the midwife or the knife makers or the vegetable and animal sellers. Why? Because even though the museum was optional a handful of students decided to tag along to learn and my impromtu lecturing left no space in my brain for thinking ahead to wanting my own photos of these objects. I had no idea this was how my brain worked. I think for all those reliefs my number one impression was their small scale. I’d enlarged them in my mind’s eye and created something of a false memory.

The vivid colors in the frescoes were intense. I wonder if this is because they have been more recently excavated and/or differently conserved from those in the Naples museum? The pigmentation was so rich and so deep.

I love the relationship of mortal and divine this image captures. Not just in scale but also in posture and attitudes. It almost looks like Hercules would have preferred a libation for his cup rather than ‘just’ the sweet smells of the incense being springled on the thymiaterion. Also the skin tones are really interested. The mortal is far paler almost a color contrast we might associate with gender difference, but here I think it is about life style. The mortal is not the massive athletic warrior of the divine and thus does not have the sunburnt skin.

This little relief was not associated by the labeling with Christianity and of course in the story of Christ among the scholars of the temple he is always beardless as it is one of the v few canonical stories of his childhood. Yet… It is clearly of a type that had a deep impact on Christian art. I like that the notes are being taken in codices, perhaps waxed tablets with multiple ‘pages’. The hand gestures so well capture the depth of the disputes above which the central teacher quite literally rises on this little platform. His own hand gesture seems to be intent on calming the dispute with his gentle authority. Aesthetically I’m in love with this. I many need to blow it up, print it on say water color paper so as to even creatively colorize it for my office back on campus. Or it would make a great basis for a fantastical collage.

I’m sure I’ve seen nearly solid blue walls but I cannot think where else. It was such a deep a beautiful shade, vibrant.

The dress and pigmentation of this Thanatos evokes deep Etruscan antecedents. I want to show this in future classes next to Etruscan tomb painting.

This figure was labeled as a Lar, but she seems quite different certainly another protect spirit associated with place, we have the male and female snakes on which Harriet Flower has written so brilliantly as spirits of the land on which humans dwell.

This relief and its reconstruction is fascinating to me because of the parallels with RRC 344/1. I’ve written on directionality and body posture on this coin on this blog before (and probably in my 2021 book, but I’m too lazy to check at this moment as I don’t have a copy to hand here in Rome). The heads of the two men in the reconstruction face each other like on the coin, but the foot position does not match and this calls into question if this reconstruction is accurate. Notice that for the right hand man we have a bit of lower leg and ankle including the top of a yummy lion skin boot (I think). The direction of that boot strongly suggests he’s exiting stage right. I want to think much harder about this at some point.

Here I’m most interested in the furniture, especially that large wood cupboard at the foot of bed, but we also have a foot stool, SOMETHING, a three legged table, and a lamp stand. How would you describe the something. I should have gotten a better close up.

The tomb doors are excellent and I should have worried about capturing the four seasons better but I only had eyes for the fasces with AXE.

Juno’s Geese, making this absolutely with out doubt the temple of our beloved Juno Moneta. Her temple thus had ionic columns.

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In the following outdoor images of mosaics the right hand image had simply been slightly de-skewed using my iPhone’s native software.

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Ace and I. Waiting for the rest of the troop to arrive. It you want to follow along with my travel log you are welcome to do so. All my daily posts from this trip.