Naples, Past and PresentNorway, Arthur H. (Arthur Hamilton)
History
Naples, Past and Present
Norway, Arthur H. (Arthur Hamilton)
Naples (Italy) -- Description and travel
know nothing.
From the House of the Surgeon it is but a little way to that of
Sallust, a larger residence, and one of later date, when tufa had
displaced limestone as a building material. It belongs, therefore, to
the same period as the vast majority of houses in the city, yet in
that period it is of the most antique, the work of a day when Greek
influence was not yet paramount in architecture or in private life. It
has no peristyle, if a late Roman addition be excepted; the family
life was not yet divided. From the atrium one looked through to
colonnade and garden, much as in the Surgeon's house. The only
paintings are in imitation of slabs of marble on the walls.
To reach the House of the Faun we must return to the Strada delle
Terme and follow it towards the north-east until it merges in the
Strada della Fortuna, in which, upon the left, stands the once
magnificent dwelling which takes its name from the beautiful bronze of
the Dancing Faun now in the Naples museum. It is much to be wished
that the treasures of this noble house could have been left in it. It
may in part be older than the house of Sallust, though belonging like
it to the Tufa period, and possessing the additional apartments
prescribed by the influx of Greek taste. Indeed the added rooms, like
all the other portions of the house, were planned with magnificence;
and as there are two atria, so there are two peristyles, each of
singular beauty and built in the purest taste. There is no house in
Pompeii in which a man should pause so long, or to which he should
come back so often; for this is the most perfect specimen of the best
age of building in the city. It is the fruit of a long age of peace,
during which the people drank in thirstily the exquisite sense of
beauty diffused from the Greek coast towns. It is not difficult to
understand how these rough townsmen, bred of sturdy mountaineers, and
inheriting no tradition of fine culture, must have been affected when
they went across the sea to Cumæ or to Pæstum, saw the austere glory
of the temples rising near the shore, talked with the men whose brains
schemed out that splendour and whose hands learnt how to fashion it,
craftsmen who wrought nothing destitute of loveliness, whose coins
were as noble as their temples, whose hearts must have been afire to
spread more widely their own perception of line and form, and who were
doubtless no less eager to teach than the Pompeiians were to learn.
There is nothing in the world to-day comparable to the magic of that
influence which spread like sunshine out of the Greek cities on the
Campanian coast, no teachers so noble, no scholars so devoted and
receptive, no people who surrender themselves so absolutely to the
dominion of beauty, and will have it pure, and none but it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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