House of the Muses
The House of the Muses ( Casa delle Muse or Domus delle Muse - III, IX, 22) is an elegant and well-preserved house in ancient Ostia .
It was built under Hadrian and has a central courtyard surrounded by arcades . There are fourteen rooms on the ground floor, which are grouped around the courtyard. There were also shops facing the street. The house is particularly noteworthy for its wall paintings, which are relatively well preserved for Ostia, which give an impression of the furnishings of a rich 2nd century house. Black and white mosaics were also found in almost all rooms. There are also numerous graffiti on the walls, for example there is a picture of the lighthouse of Ostia and a drawing of Trajan's Column . Two stairwells occupy at least one additional floor.
The general character of this house, in which the extremely wealthy residents of Ostia certainly lived, remains unclear. At least the basement, apart from a few shops, apparently only belonged to one family, so one would like to speak of a single-family house (domus) . But there was a staircase separated from this apartment, so that obviously other families lived on the upper floors and the whole complex was apparently a rich apartment building.
Several rooms deserve a mention because of the well-preserved and high-quality wall paintings. In room V there are the pictures of Apollo and the muses , who gave the house its name. The wall decoration shows alternating red and yellow fields, each with a painted figure. The dividing fields show columns and behind them light architecture on a yellow or red background. The wall paintings from room IX show white fields in two registers, which are separated by reddish-yellow narrow fields. Painted candelabra can be found in the narrow fields. The white main fields show a figure in the middle and light architecture on the sides. In the upper register there are mirrors with a figure in the middle and painted panels in the side panels.
literature
- G. Calza, G. Begatti: Ostia, Roma 1977, p. 43.
- BM Felletti Maj, P. Moreno: Le pitture della casa delle Muse, 1968.
Web link
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://immagini.iccd.beniculturali.it/FOTOFULL/E4/E40672.jpg ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Felletti Maj, Moreno: Le pitture della casa delle Muse, pp. 20-30.
- ↑ Felletti Maj, Moreno: Le pitture della casa delle Muse, pp. 35-38.
Coordinates: 41 ° 45 ′ 7.6 ″ N , 12 ° 17 ′ 7.6 ″ E