The Megalography in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii

Abstract

The room of the triclinium in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii distinguishes itself as an enigmatic representation in an ideal architectural setting. The plinth with a black background, with geometric ornamentation, is the result of a restoration that took place at the time of the III style, while the upper part of the walls shows the original decoration datable in II style. The pictorial cycle focuses on the evident centrality of the couple Dionysus and Arianna; the reference to Dionysus is present for the initiation into the Dionysian rites, and Arianna highlights the pre-eminence of the female figure. It is singular that many centuries later, a treatise writer of the 16th century, Filarete, wrote that there must be a couple to create good architecture or a city: a father, an enlightened orince, and a mother, the architect, who generates the ideas of the prince. The research on the Villa of the Mysteries has offered the chance to reflect on technologies as prostheses of thought and logos that generate the drawing of the existing or the drawing of what has not been realized yet. The age we live in is characterized by the use of advanced digital technologies in the training and research activity of architects and designers: the experience conducted in Pompeii reaffirms the authoritativeness of thought that cannot break the essential link that binds the person who draws with the object, thus answering our questions if it is possible to establish a new paradigm that links the observer to the object, often oriented only by iconic libraries of software programmes. As we know, artefacts or landscapes are silent: they ‘speak’ through the observer, transferring to the hand the responsibility to express what the mind generates.