Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/462

Rh 420 A K C H I T E C T U R E [ROMAN. mouldings arid ornaments in the interior of the villa of Hadrian, though in themselves classical and elegant, are email, and have a general air of littleness, especially when compared with the apartments to which they belong, not that the apartments are generally large, but they are for the most part lofty. The ceilings appear to have been formed by vaulting ; there are no indications of windows, and none of stairs of any magnitude so that the rooms must have been nearly, if not quite, open at one end to admit light and air ; and the probability is that there were seldom apartments above the ground floor, though it is likely enough that terraces formed on the vaulted roofs were used for the purposes of recreation and pleasure. Of the floors, which were of .mosaic, several are preserved entire in the museum of the Vatican ; where also are deposited many fine specimens of ornamental sculpture in vases and cande labra, besides busts, statues, and groups in bronze, marble, porphyry, and granite, of various styles, remains of the noble collection Hadrian made during his progress through his extensive dominions, which have been found among the ruins of the villa. In Pompeii we may see the domestic as well as public architecture of ancient Rome, although it must be remem bered that Pompeii was a Greek colony, and that it was destroyed, as early as 79 A.D. We have, therefore, pro bably to expect more Greek character than would be met with elsewhere. The streets of Pompeii are very narrow, their average width being not more than 12 or 15 feet; frequently they are not more than 8 feet wide, and very few in any part exceed 20. The principal excavated street in the city, that leading from the Forum to the gate towards Hcrcu- laneum, and the street of the tombs, is, at the widest, 23 feet G inches, including two footways, each 5 feet wide. The streets are all paved with lava, and almost all have side pavements or footways, which, however, are for the most part so narrow, that, with few exceptions, two per sons cannot pass on them. That the cars or carriages of the inhabitants could not pass each other in most of the streets, is proved by the wheel-ruts which have been worn on the stones, and the recesses made here and there for the purpose of passing. They are lined on both sides with small cells, which served for shops of various kinds ; and they are strikingly like the ordinary shops in towns in the south of Italy and in Sicily at the present time (Plate XVII. fig. 1). They resemble these, too, in this respect, that there appear in very few cases to be accommodations in connection with the shops for the occupiers and their families, who must have lived elsewhere, as modern Italian shopkeepers very commonly do. They present no archi tectural decoration whatever ; the fronts are merely plain stuccoed brick walls / with a large square opening in each, part of which is the door, and part the window, for light ing the place and showing the goods. Whenever- a private house or gentleman s mansion was situated in a good place for business (like the ground floor of many modern Italian noblemen s palaces), the street-front, or fronts, were entirely occupied with shops, a comparatively narrow entrance to the house being preserved in a conveni ent part between some two of them (Plate XVII. fig. 3). The door to this is sometimes quite plain, but at times is decorated with pilasters When the site permitted such an arrangement, the entrance door being open, a passer by could look completely through the house to the garden, or, in the absence of a garden, to the extreme boundary- wall, on which was painted a landscape or other picture. An arrangement, it may be observed, not unlike this, is common in some of the Italian cities at the present day ; but the mansions being now built in stories, and the upper stories alone being occupied by the families, a merely pleasing effect is produced ; whilst in the former, persons crossing from one apartment to another were exposed to view, and domestic privacy thus completely invaded, to produce a pretty picture. Inside the entrance passage, which may be from 10 to 12 feet in depth, there is a space, the atrium, generally square, or nearly s&amp;lt; on which different rooms open, that vary in size from 10 feet square to 10 feet by 12, or even 12 feet square; they have door ways only, and were probably used as sleeping-chambers by the male servants of the family. In the centre of this court there is a sunk basin or reservoir for receiving the rain, called the impluvium, rendering it likely that this was roofed over, with a well-hole to admit light and air, and allow the rain to drop from the roof into the reservoir. Connected with this outer court was the kitchen and its accessories. If the site allowed the second court to be placed beyond the first in the same direction from the entrance, the communication was by a wide opening not unlike folding doors between rooms in modern houses, generally with a space intervening, which was variously occupied ; or a mere passage led from one to the other. The second or inner court is generally much larger than the first, and is for the most part a parallelogram, but variously proportioned. It forms a tctrastoon, being open in the middle and arranged with a peristyle of columns, colonnading a covered walk all round. On this the best and most finished apartments open; but they are of such various sizes, and are so variously arranged, that it is not easy to determine more than that they included the refectory, the library, and sleeping-rooms. Some of them, indeed, are such as must have been useless except for the last purpose ; these, perhaps, were the apartments of the female branches of a family, at least in most cases. Some houses, however, have a nest of small cells in an inner corner or secluded recess, which may have been the gynaeceum ; but that is far from being common. Exhe- drae or recesses, open in front to the atrium, are common, and are often painted with more care and elegance than any other part of the house ; but generally the walls are everywhere painted in the more common places flat, with a slight degree of ornament, perhaps, and in the best rooms, with arabesques and pictures in compartments. The architectural decorations are mostly painted; the ornaments are not unfrequently elegant, but the architecture itself of the mansions is bad in almost every sense. The rooms being windowless, would, when covered, be necessarily dark ; the doors are arranged without any regard to uniformity, either in size or situation. The street-fronts of those houses which, not being in a good business situa tion, were not occupied with shops, were not merely un adorned, but were actually deformed by loop-holes, to light some passage or inner closet which had no door on one of the courts. (Plate XVII. fig. 8.) The columns of the second courts are generally in the worst style possible : those which have foliated capitals, and may be considered com positions of the Corinthian order, are the best; but the imitations of Doric and Ionic are both mean and ugly. From the uses to which they were put, and the wideness of their intercolumniations, together with the fact that none of them have been found in Pompeii, it is probablo that the entablatures were of wood, and were consequently burnt at the time of the destruction of the city, and broken up by the inhabitants, almost all of whom certainly escaped, and who, it is very evident, returned, when the fiery showei and the conflagration had ceased, to remove whatever they could find of their property undestroyed ; for it must be remembered that the roofs and ceilings all over the city are entirely gone, and the uncovered and broken walla remain, from 8 to 10 feet only in height. Everything, indeed, clearly demonstrates that great exertions were used