Pompeii No.58: Pompeii's Finale

No, I don't mean smoke and ashes. When I say, "Pompeii's Finale," I simply mean that my home mural project has finally come to an end.

Since my last posting. the mural's window plaque has received a gold surface and a Latin inscription. The font is appropriately named Trajan, and the saying translates as, "Know Thyself," wise and profound advice from the ages.

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Here are views of the room as it appears today... 

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I promised my blogging friend Yvette that I would include a view from the kitchen. It's painted an orange, but I think you could also call it a Pompeian yellow.

Of course there is still work to be done — the Roman grille for the window, a solution to shield the kitchen from view while still allowing easy access, perhaps revised lighting, and then finally, the furnishings. That should be a lot of fun. In the meantime, I'll put away the ladder, the drop cloth and many quarts of paint.

Thanks for viewing!

Pompeii No.57: Window Treatments

If you've been following the many installments of the Pompeii Room's evolution, you might remember that I painted the window frame at the very beginning.

I chose to begin there because it was the first thing that people entering the room would see. But I painted it loosely because I wanted to give a little momentum to the project. At the time, I said I'd return at a later date and add more detail. Well, that time is now.

I began by repainting the entire frame to better match the rest of the room's masonry. Now all the masonry is in the same color family, primarily a Sherwin Williams paint called Sand Dollar.

Here you can see the before and after. The original window frame was a light mustard yellow that I equated with sandstone, and as you can see, I've better delineated the torus that tops the window frame.

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My friend Sandy — who gives excellent critiques — thinks that the cobalt blue plaque makes the frame a little too top heavy, even if it will be getting an inscription. She's made a suggestion that I like, and so that blue will be replaced by my next posting.

You've undoubtedly noticed that in all my images of the Pompeii Room's window, I've masked the actual window with gray. That's because I've been bothered all along by a venetian blind, which quickly destroys the illusion I've been working hard to create.

Greek Revival America  |  Roger G. Kennedy  |  detail of a photograph by Robert Lautman

What I really wanted was a Roman grill like the image above. I drew plans of such a window and even consulted with a fine carpenter who's done other work on the house.

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I also looked into the possibility of using industrial grilles.

And then last week, while my house was being tented, I discovered this antique screen, originally hinged as a room divider. If you look closely, you might be able to see that by removing an X'd unit from the bottom of each panel, the fit will be almost perfect. I'm thrilled.

I hope you'll join me for the next installment!

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Pompeii No.56: The Tympanum

In Pompeii No. 41, I showed the pediment above the kitchen door thusly, asking my readers whether its interior should be left plain or ornamented. The unanimous response was that the tympanum (properly identified by Jim of The Road to Parnassus) should be ornamented, and so by popular demand, that's the project for this week.

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My first tympanum drafting was "A," but the more I looked at it, the more those leaf scrolls reminded me of a Victorian furniture design. So I redesigned the tympanum as "B," which has a more graceful and authentically Greek feel to it. (The Pompeians were looking to ancient Greece for inspiration.) Incidentally, all parts of the mural have been worked out in tracings like the examples above.

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The architectural decoration above is called an akroter, and is found at the apex of gables on classical buildings, especially Greek temples. Within the typical akroter is an element called the palmette, which I'm incorporating into my own design.

Ercolano-Green by Richard Ginori  |  www.klatmagazine.com

This handsome plate also features palmettes.

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The finished tympanum — a look one doesn't often see above a kitchen door. Thanks to my readers for encouraging me to add it!

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Pompeii No.47: Tragic Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci, from a self-portrait

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, my version of Pompeii includes details that the Pompeians themselves would have recognized, but it also incorporates later interpretations of Pompeii. I think that my version of Pompeii has an eighteenth-century feel, with a nod to the Renaissance artists who were celebrating antiquity long before Pompeii was uncovered in 1748.

The living room portion of my Pompeii will have what I call the template of the original Pompeii Room (the columns and background panels that are the bones of the mural), but otherwise will have the look of the Renaissance. For the small living room wall, I'm incorporating the work of the master Annibale Carracci, shown above.

drawingowu.files.wordpress.com  |  www.getty.edu

On the left, above, is a pastel portrait of Carracci, and on the right is Carracci's Portrait of a Lute Player, c. 1593-94, doubtlessly a self-portrait.

Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) was born in Bologna to a working class family and at a young age he was apprenticed to a goldsmith. He was forever drawing, and before long he was studying art with Barolomeo Passerotti, a successful Bolognese artist of the day.

Annibale was a great admirer of Michelangelo and Raphael, but also studied the works of northern Italian and Venetian masters. His subject matter ran the gamut ...

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... from mythology and classical antiquity ...

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... to religious works ...

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... to landscapes ...

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... to genre art.

Carracci developed a style of naturalism, or realism, that he blended very successfully with classical art, and it was a revolutionary and popular direction for his time. In the 1580s he and other family members founded the Carracci Academy, where his "idealized realism" was taught.

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In 1595, the very powerful Cardinal Odoardo Farnese called Carracci to Rome, to decorate the Palazzo Farnese, shown above.

click to enlarge   |   www.gopixpic.com

First Carracci painted the Cardinal's private study, then several years later, the ceiling of the famous Farnese Gallery, shown above. It was the Cardinal's idea to portray the gods of Olympus and all their loves.

Carracci, much influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, painted the ceiling to look like a combination of framed paintings and supporting sculptures, though it is all fresco work.

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Carracci, for all his brilliance, was a timid soul. He dressed poorly, was shy and prone to stuttering. If you look up Cardinal Farnese on a site like Wikipedia, he'll be credited for having been a patron of the arts. That is true, but he was also a cruel taskmaster who enjoyed mocking Annibale's handicaps at every turn.

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When the glorious ceiling was finished, the cardinal paid Carracci only 500 scudi for his years of work which, by my research into 1600's currency, was probably a lot less than minimum wage — a huge, vile insult.

Another personality — a Michelangelo, say — would have sought recourse, and probably exacted revenge, too. But Carracci was humble, and Farnese, descended from a pope and royal houses, was very, very powerful.

Carracci reacted by falling into a deep depression from which he never recovered. He suffered a stroke, quit painting altogether, and soon died.

The Farnese Gallery itself was a huge triumph and a standard for all other artists for many years thereafter.

Carracci by Carlo Maratti | pinterest, beardbriarandrose

Annibale Carracci's contemporaries realized that he had forged a new direction in Italian art, and buried him in the Pantheon next to his hero Raphael. Today, Carracci's work is considered a bridge between the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

I'll be borrowing elements from the Farnese Gallery for my living room wall, so I hope you check back for upcoming posts!
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Pompeii No.46: The Next Chapter

In my last posting I revealed a view of the Pompeii Room as it looked almost completed, below.

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But this is not what one saw when one entered my house, because the door is to the right of this perspective. In fact, the view was more like the illustration below.

It therefore occurred to me — as I was repainting the red wainscoting — that the Pompeii Room would need to extend into the living room, in order to make a fuller statement . . .

. . . and look like this. And so this posting is all about continuing the background template into the living room.

For a long time, the living room wall facing the front door featured a dramatic Victorian image of a red-haired lady (a close-up heads this posting). It was a lithograph printed on cloth, rather remarkable technology for the 1800s.

Early in the picture's residency, the 5-year-old daughter of friends entered the house and commented that the lady looked sad. "Yes," I said. "you're right. She's sad because she doesn't have a name." Without hesitating for a moment, the little girl said, "Her name is Zenita!" And thereafter she remained Zenita.

When I painted the new wainscoting, and the chair rail and moulding, I extended the project to Zenita's wall.

Then I duplicated the Pompeian background to match the original room. I also painted the interior of the bookcases a dusty mauve, a color that picks up some details from the mural and gives the living room a little extra tie-in. (The bookcase interior is brighter in this image because it's being flooded with light for the photograph; its actual impact is more subtle.)

The columns don't extend all the way down to the wainscoting because they're going to be partially obscured by future design elements.

In my next posting, I'll share the inspiration for the living room, an homage to a Late Renaissance master. I hope you'll join me then!
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Pompeii No.44: The Moulding & Chair Rail

I often paint mouldings and frames into the art I do on canvas, like the detail above. As I was working on this canvas (which is as yet unfinished), I thought it would be fun to incorporate such a moulding as an element of the Pompeii Room. Maybe a little simpler, though.

The moulding I settled on was borrowed from this exceptional stone entrance that I photographed in New York City.

As you can see from this early diagram (used in Pompeii No. 13), it was almost from the beginning my intention to have a chair rail and moulding separating the green bar from the red wainscoting. So let's get started.

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Here's how the chair rail and moulding look today. The green takes on a very different quality now that it's framed by the yellow and not immediately juxtaposed to that deep red. Below are other images of the room, and its new moulding.

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