The floor plan of the House of the Faun illustrates its immensity--it covers an area of over 30,000 square feet. The size is comparable to eastern Hellenistic palaces --and Alexis Christensen has argued that the house was designed to imitate palaces like that found on Delos.
The detailed floor plan shown in the image was published by archaeologist August Mau in 1902, and it is somewhat out of date, particularly with reference to the identification of the purposes of the smaller rooms. But it shows the main flashy bits of the house--two atria and two peristyles.
A Roman atrium is a rectangular open air court, sometimes paved and sometimes with an interior basin for catching rainwater, called an impluvium. The two atria are the open rectangles at the front of the building (on the left side of this image)--the one with the 'Dancing Faun' that gives the House of the Faun it's name is the upper one. A peristyle is a large open courtyard surrounded with columns. That huge open space at the back of the house is the largest one; the central open space is the other.
Sources
For more on the archaeology of Pompeii, see Pompeii: Buried in Ashes.
For more on the archaeology of Pompeii, see Pompeii: Buried in Ashes.
Beard, Mary. 2008. The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Christensen, Alexis. 2006. From palaces to Pompeii: The architectural and social context of Hellenistic floor mosaics in the House of the Faun. PhD dissertation, Department of Classics, Florida State University.
Mau, August. 1902. Pompeii, Its Life and Art. Translated by Francis Wiley Kelsey. The MacMillan Company.
No comments:
Post a Comment