Why Are There Monsters in the Decoration? Somebody Dug Up a Buried Palace
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A style of ornament combining foliage, human figures and impossible hybrid creatures took its name from underground rooms, and it swept European decoration after one discovery in Rome.
Where the name comes from
In the late fifteenth century Romans exploring cavities in a hillside found painted rooms buried underground, which they reached by being lowered through holes in the ceilings. The rooms turned out to be part of Nero's enormous palace, buried deliberately when later building covered the site, and the paintings on the walls had survived precisely because they had been sealed away. Because the spaces were reached as caves, the ornament found in them was described by a word meaning of the caves, and that word attached to the style and eventually, much later, drifted in ordinary English to mean anything ugly or distorted.
What the style consists of
The vocabulary is consistent and immediately recognisable:
- •Slender vertical stems supporting impossible weight
- •Foliage turning into animals and animals into foliage
- •Hybrid creatures combining human, animal and plant parts
- •Small figures, masks, urns and musical instruments
- •Symmetry about a central axis, panel by panel
- •Large areas of plain ground between the ornament
How it spread so fast
Artists visited the buried rooms within a few years of the discovery, climbing down with torches and copying what they found, and several carved their names into the plaster where they remain. Raphael and his workshop used the vocabulary in the Vatican loggias from 1517, which placed it at the centre of the most prestigious decorative commission in Europe. Engravings of those designs circulated widely and carried the style to workshops that had never seen Rome. It appeared in ceramics, furniture, metalwork, textiles and book decoration within a generation, and remained a standard part of the European decorative vocabulary for three centuries.
What happened to the rooms
The site that generated the style was damaged badly by the attention it attracted, which is a recurring pattern in archaeology. Visitors climbing down with torches left soot on the paintings and cut their names into the plaster, and the sudden exposure of surfaces sealed for fourteen hundred years began a decay that continues. Damp from the ground above is the principal ongoing problem, since the rooms sit beneath a park and water moves through the fill. Sections of ceiling have collapsed, most recently in 2010, and the site has been closed and reopened repeatedly while stabilisation and drainage work proceeds.
The objection to it
The style attracted criticism from the beginning on the ground that it depicts things that cannot exist. Vitruvius had already complained in the first century before the common era about painted decoration showing stems too thin to support what stands on them and creatures that are half one thing and half another, calling such work a depiction of what does not, cannot and never did exist. Renaissance theorists repeated the objection, and it recurs whenever decoration is judged against a standard of truth to nature. The defence has always been that ornament is not representation and is not claiming that anything depicted exists, which is an argument that continues in other forms.
The takeaway
Painted rooms of Nero's buried palace were reached through ceiling holes in the late fifteenth century, and because they were entered as caves the ornament inside took a name meaning of the caves. Raphael's workshop used the vocabulary in the Vatican from 1517 and engravings spread it across Europe within a generation. Vitruvius had already objected that such decoration shows what cannot exist.