House of the Vettii

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The House of the Vettii reopened to tourists in January 2023, after two decades of restoration work. The domus in Pompeii had been preserved since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, its walls still holding twelve mythological scenes painted after an earthquake in 62 AD. The house takes its name from two freedmen, Aulus Vettius Conviva and Aulus Vettius Restitutus, men who had once been enslaved. How did two former slaves come to own one of the largest domus in Pompeii, a home spanning the entire southern section of block 15? And what do the paintings they commissioned reveal about how they wanted the world to see them?

• 2. Two Atriums, One House

  ›

  Five sections define the layout of the house: a large atrium, a small atrium, a large peristyle, a small peristyle, and a shop. A visitor entering from the east facade, off the Vicolo dei Vettii, passes through a fauces and a vestibulum before reaching the large atrium. A second doorway on the south facade opens from the Vicolo di Mercurio. Five small windows line the east wall, two narrow vertical windows cut the south facade, and a single window faces west.

  Four rooms encircle the small atrium in the northern part of the house, spaces scholars believe served as servants' quarters and storage. A kitchen sits nearby, paired with a cubiculum for the cook and an impluvium built to catch rainwater through an opening in the roof. A staircase once climbed from the southeast corner of this atrium, though the floor it led to no longer survives.

  Four cubicula surround the large atrium instead, rooms most likely used by the Vettii themselves, along with two alae and a winter triclinium. Looking through the main entrance and across the large atrium, a visitor's eye reaches straight through to the rear garden, framed by the large peristyle. Two triclinia, an oecus, and two storage rooms overlook that peristyle, while a separate small peristyle to the north holds its own triclinium and cubiculum.

  A second service zone worked independently of the small atrium. It was reached through a large gate off the Vicolo di Mercurio, where draft animals were led into the taberna, or shop, and stabled there. An extra chamber and a latrine stood alongside it. Unlike the typical Roman domus, the House of the Vettii has no tablinum at all. That gap in an otherwise conventional floor plan hints at how the Vettii arranged privacy around the paintings the next rooms reveal.

• 3. A Style Built From Three

  ›

  A ring of faux colored marble runs along the base of each wall, a device borrowed straight from the First Pompeian style. Above it, illusionistic scenes create depth in the manner of the Second style, both in the upper band and around the mythological panels themselves. Unrealistically thin painted columns hold up that upper register, a trick lifted from the Third style. The mythological scenes themselves are what mark this combination as something new, the innovation art historians call the Fourth style.

  Mythological panels survive across the house, most set in the two triclinia off the peristyle garden and in the triclinium beside the small peristyle. The rest appear in a triclinium and a cubiculum to the left of the main entrance. Scholars believe the scenes were copied from Greek originals, though no Greek paintings survive for comparison. Together the panels build a theme of divine reward and punishment, with one scene spotlighting Jupiter and his sons enforcing order over the world.

  Beyond those mythological panels, two more images depict Priapus, the god of fertility. The first is a fresco set in a doorway, showing Priapus weighing his phallic member on a set of scales. The second image repeats the composition, this time carved in marble. Those two images of Priapus set a comic, bodily counterpoint to the mythological scenes surrounding them elsewhere in the house.

• 4. The North Triclinium

  ›

  On the east wall of the north triclinium, Ixion the Lapith king pays for betraying Zeus. Welcomed onto Olympus, Ixion grew to want Hera, Zeus's own wife, and tried to seduce her. Zeus shaped a cloud into her likeness, the goddess Nephele, and let Ixion lie with her instead. Their union produced the centaurs. Zeus banished Ixion from Olympus and ordered Hermes to bind him to a wheel of fire meant to spin forever. Hermes stands out front, identifiable by his winged sandals and caduceus, one hand stopping the wheel while Hephaestus behind him sets it moving. Hera, enthroned to the right with a gold scepter and crown, pulls back her veil to watch, while her messenger Iris presents her the sight. A young woman seated beside Hermes, one hand raised, may be Nephele or Ixion's own mother, according to scholars.

  On the north wall of the same room, Daedalus presents Pasiphae with a wooden cow. King Minos had refused to sacrifice a prized bull to Poseidon, and the god retaliated by making Minos's wife, Pasiphae, desire the animal. She commissioned Daedalus, the craftsman, to build a hollow cow so she could conceal herself inside and mate with the bull. Daedalus stands at the center of the scene, his back turned. One hand rests on the cow as he gestures and explains to Pasiphae and her attendants. She sits to the left with two companions, all three staring past him at the cow's open back. A boy beside Daedalus, either an apprentice or his son Icarus, raises a hammer and chisel against the wooden beam. Pasiphae's union with the bull would produce the Minotaur. Daedalus's role in the plot cost him and his son Icarus their freedom soon after, imprisoned by Minos before their famous winged escape from Crete.

  On the south wall, Dionysus discovers Ariadne asleep on the island of Naxos. Ariadne is the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, abandoned there by Theseus after he slew the Minotaur. She lies on a leopard skin, her back to the viewer, wearing gold armlets, anklets, and tiny blue flowers in her hair. Hypnos, the god of sleep, stands winged beside her pillow, sprinkling water from a small gold dish to keep her sleeping. Dionysus, though faded with time, appears at a three-quarter turn, ivy leaves in his hair, a tall thyrsos topped with a gold eagle. Three satyrs and two maenads surround the pair, one satyr lifting the edge of Ariadne's mantle while Cupid crouches in the corner, gazing at her. A red and blue tambourine and small gold cymbals lie nearby. A seascape fills the background, echoing a subject long popular in Greek vase painting. Three more painted myths waited in the triclinium across the peristyle, each one turning again on the theme of a mortal crossing a god.

• 5. The Southern Triclinium

  ›

  Pentheus, the King of Thebes, refused to accept that Dionysus was a god and locked him away, banning his worship in the city. Dionysus escaped and lured Pentheus, disguised as a maenad, up Mt. Cithairon to spy on the women worshipping him there. Among those women were Pentheus's own mother, Agave, and her sisters Ino and Autonoë. They spotted him hiding behind a pine tree and mistook him for a lion. Painted on the east wall of the southern triclinium, the scene shows Pentheus fallen to one knee as the women close in. One grips his hair, a thyrsos raised to strike, while another pulls his arm back.

  On the south wall of the same room, a bull, not a blade, kills Dirce. She was the wife of Lykos and had treated his imprisoned niece, Antiope, with cruelty for years. Antiope's twin sons, Amphion and Zethus, were born after Zeus seduced their mother. Lykos abandoned the infants on Mt. Cithairon, but a shepherd found and raised them, and the brothers eventually rescued Antiope. They sentenced Dirce to die the same way, dragged to death by a bull. The painting freezes that moment: the bull rears up as a rope pulls tight around Dirce's wrist.

  The north wall completes the room with the infant Herakles gripping two snakes sent to kill him. Hera was jealous of her husband Zeus's affair with Alkmena. She had sent the snakes into the crib of their newborn son, hoping to end his life before he could grow. Painted in this final corner, the toddler Herakles chokes a serpent in each fist while Amphitryon, Alkmena's husband, watches startled from his throne. Where Ixion, Dirce, and Pentheus all met the punishment the gods intended for them, the infant in this last panel simply refuses to die.

• 6. The South-East Triclinium

  ›

  On the south wall of the south-east triclinium, Pan and Eros face off, not yet fighting, staring at each other in profile. Eros stretches his arms toward Pan, bent over with his legs spread. Pan raises only his right arm, his left hand tucked behind his back as a handicap. Dionysus watches from the left, seated on a rock, a thyrsos in one hand and a gold wreath in the other, ready for whoever wins. Ariadne sits just behind him, her breast and shoulder bare beneath a light-blue mantle, resting a hand on his shoulder. Silenus, nude but for a red cloth and ivy leaves, stands to the right holding a pine branch, his palm turned toward the wrestlers.

  On the north wall of the same room, Cyparissus sits on a stone, a cypress cone sprouting from his head. He was Apollo's lover, transformed into a cypress tree after he killed the god's beloved stag. A purple mantle covers his knee and drapes his thigh, one hand resting on the stone, the other on a gold scepter. Apollo's gilded tripod stands nearby on a covered stone. The stag lies dead in front of it, a broken spear jutting from its side. In the upper corner, a nymph leans on a boulder, watching Cyparissus, two branches held in her hand.

  On the east wall, Achilles hears a trumpet and reaches for weapons hidden among gifts, revealing who he truly is. His mother, Thetis, had disguised him as a maiden among King Lykomedes's daughters on the island of Skyros. She was hiding him from a war she knew would kill him. Achilles fathered a son there with Deidameia before Odysseus arrived with arms laid out among gifts, waiting for the trumpet to expose him. In the painting, Odysseus runs in from the right with spear and sword. A woman, possibly Deidameia, flees nude but for gold anklets and a grey mantle. A figure in the background, decorated with a Gorgoneion on his armor, blows the trumpet that gives Achilles away. Two more painted rooms waited beyond this one, each holding stories the Vettii chose to keep separate.

• 7. Two Final Rooms

  ›

  In the triclinium beside the small peristyle, a single scene shows Herakles, drunk, assaulting Auge, daughter of the King of Tegea and priestess of Athena. Auge kneels on one knee at a stream, lifting Athena's sacred peplos from the water with one hand while pushing Herakles back with the other. Herakles leans in, stumbling, propped up by his club, grabbing at the edge of her mantle with his free hand. His bow and quiver hang from a strap on his wrist, and only a lion skin covers his arm and back. A companion beside Auge tries to ward him off too, while two more women behind them look on, one raising a kantharos above Auge's head. Their union that day would produce a son, Telephus.

  Next door, in the cubiculum beside the large atrium, Ariadne lies abandoned on a red cloth. She watches Theseus's ship sail away from Naxos after he killed the Minotaur. Her hand is raised to her mouth as Cupid points toward the departing ship, and a helmsman, possibly Theseus himself, steers from the stern. On the opposite wall of that same room, Leander swims the Hellespont toward Hero's tower, guided each night by torches she lit for him. A storm douses her light one night, drowning Leander, and Hero throws herself into the sea after him. Three dolphins swim above him in the water, and on the shore a servant waits with a lantern beside Leander's folded clothes. Every one of these rooms belonged to two men whose identities survive only through a pair of bronze seals found in the house's front hall.

• 8. Freedmen and Their Proof

  ›

  Two bronze seals found in the house's front hall carry the names that identify its owners. One reads 'A. Vetti Restituti', or 'of Aulus Vettius Restitutus'. The other carries 'A. Vetti Convivaes', a form scholars mark as a misspelling, meaning 'of Aulus Vettius Conviva'. A ring bearing the initials A. V. C. turned up as further evidence, alongside wax tablets and notices once pasted outside the house.

  Preserved business tablets belonging to Lucius Caecillius name Aulus Vettius Conviva as a witness, describing him there as a free man. Graffiti on the house's southern facade goes further, identifying Conviva as an Augustalis, a type of priest. A fragment of a seal ring, abbreviated 'Aug', echoes that same title. Scholars still caution that the epigraphic evidence is too thin to prove the Vettii owned the house beyond doubt, even though most researchers accept it.

  Scholars believe the Vettii had once been enslaved by an aristocratic family, based on their cognomina, or third given names. Conviva and Restitutus were both names commonly tied to servitude, and Restitutus in particular was a typical slave name. The richness of the house's decoration and the fact that the Augustalis position was often held by former slaves support the same conclusion. Historians disagree over whether the two men were brothers or simply fellow former slaves. Some argue Conviva alone owned the house and that Restitutus was his son, brother, or freedman, inheriting it only after Conviva's death. Whether the two Vettii were brothers, fellow slaves, or something else, that question remains open, unresolved by the seals, tablets, and graffiti that name them.