Old Roman – Pompejanum: A garden wall as a view

On August 24, 79 of our era around 10 a.m., the people in Pompeii saw the mountain tip of the Vesuvi broke out under an infernal roar. Glowing, gas-rich magma was thrown up into the air, disassembled by the escaping gas pressure and fell, driven from the wind to the south, down as a ash and pumice rain on Pompeii.

At that time, the city in the Coastal behind the Gulf of Naples had been Roman colony for a centuries and a half, officially called Colonia Veneria Cornelia Pompeianorum. The fleeing, many Oscisch-Samni origin, which flee in front of the ash rain, did not get far. They collapsed after exhaustion after a short time, and those who wanted to save themselves into the villas or burial buildings suffocated or were killed by the buildings collapsing among the numerous earthquakes. The city’s prosperity was made to disappear. It was based on slave work, as a recently published in the British magazine “Past & Present” Study Von Seth Bernard (University of Toronto) underlines.

Pompeii was under a relatively loose layer of ash. The fertile floors covered lush plant growth. Hardly anyone knew about the devastating volcanic eruption. Excavations were not started until 1748. After 1808, they experienced a large, but only short upswing when the French officer Joachim Murat and his wife Caroline, the sister of Napoleon, climbed the Neapolitan throne. The objects that were conveyed to light soon became coveted collector’s objects. Pompeii is dug until today. A house was exposed in October last year, with four murals visible, including one that shows a satyr and a nymph during sex.

In Aschaffenburg, a replica of a Roman villa, as it once stood in Pompeii, can be seen: the Pompejanum. Because of its mild climate, the Lower Franconian city is often referred to as the “Bavarian Nice”. It owes this name to Ludwig I, 1825 to 1848 King of Bavaria who loved the Mediterranean climate. Aschaffenburg he declared his preferred summer residence. In 1826 he acquired parts of the Collection of Caroline Murat, whose Pompeii passion he shared. Ludwig had been in the excavated Roman city several times since his crown prince. Her former downfall was densely complained about by him: “What the earth was true for eighteen centuries of the holy dark, soon expires when it came/ to the light, we just see it to never see it again …”

The richly equipped Pompei villas in particular had taken it to him. They inspired him to make this living environment tangible north of the Alps. This is how the Pompejanum was created, which protrudes over a small wine -growing region on the Main. The model for architecture and equipment was the Casa dei Dioscuri, the house of Castor and Pollux, in Pompeii. The idea for a copy of this building on a scale of 1: 1 probably came on a journey together with his architect Friedrich von Gärtner (1791–1847) in 1839. This was then conducted the construction work, his successor was his nephew Karl Friedrich Klump (1811–1885). With the equipment of the house, Ludwig commissioned his artistic consultant Martin von Wagner (1777–1858).

Unlike the Roman houses in Pompeii, the Pompejanum is free, and Friedrich von Gärtner added an effective outer staircase with a column stem and a viewing pavilion on the roof. In 1848 the shell was practically completed, the interior was finished in 1850. However, the decline of the new building quickly started because the moisture -sensitive wall paintings of the open southern construction were not up to the rough Franconian winter climate. The Aschaffenburg painter Adalbert Hock (1866-1949) was repeatedly employed for four decades.

Towards the end of the Second World War, the Pompejanum was hit hard, and ceilings and walls and the paintings collapsed in the ground floor rooms around the atrium. It was only in August 1994 that the ground floor of the Pompejanum was opened as the first section of the museum.

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Today’s visitors see a museum of themselves because the restoration took place in gradations. The original condition of the wall painting is visible or guessed in many places. The construction consists of an almost square area around the atrium and a slightly larger building wing, which lies U-shape around the viridarium, the home garden. In the building, resting on the pedestal of Greek poets and thinkers as well as the important Roman emperors are distributed to the sinking of Pompeii. In the middle of the red wall fields you can see the mythological figures painted based on role models in the Castor and Pollux house. In a restored cubiculum (bedroom) there is a marble statue of the Bacchus (Greek Dionysos), the god of wine, in another a statue of Fortuna, which is portrayed as “agathe tyche” (good fate) in Greek and Roman art.

The Romans fed lying, that is, stretched out on couch -like loungers and supported on pillows. Her dining room was called Triclinium because there were usually three clines, i.e. three, were put together in a horseshoe shape or arranged around a table. The classes in the two dining rooms of the Pompejanum are modern copies. The Sommertriclinium, reaching through the pillared hall, offers a look at the viridarium (from lat. »Grün«), the home garden.

In Pompeii, the back of the viridarium mostly pushed either to a street, such as at the Castor and Pollux house, or the back wall of the next house. That is why this side of the garden was closed with a wall and painted with garden motifs. Spring fountains, birds, trees and flowering shrubs should visually enlarge the small home garden. In the Pompejanum, imitation leads to the peculiar result that such a view was painted on a garden wall that blocks the view of the area.

The white mosaic floor with black dots in the anteroom to the summer triclinium is the best preserved in the Pompejanum. A white marble figure of a drunken satyr who relies on a wine hose rests on him. It is a Roman copy according to a Greek original. If you want to be drunk like the Satyr, it is not very easy: the “Pompejaner”, that is, the wine that is obtained from the grapes that mature below the Pompejanum, is only available in a single Aschaffenburg beverage treatment, the name of which can be requested at the cash register of this royal viewing object for studying ancient culture.

Pompejanum, Pompejanumstr. 5, Aschaffenburg. Closed from November to March, as well as on Mondays (except on public holidays). Until October 31. can be seen “Inspiration Pompeii – 175 years of the interior of the Pompejanum”: Drawings from the construction period not previously shown and a silver treasure find from Pompeii.