The Grotto-Complex in Tiberius’s Villa at Sperlonga: Experientiality, Immersion, and Owner-as-Spectacle Public
May, Mekayla (Spring 2020)
Abstract
The grotto-complex in Tiberius’s villa at Sperlonga has features, however, that reveal a distinctive Roman execution intent on portraying the owner as occupying a liminal space between heaven and mortals. Attempting to recreate and enhance the natural theater, the owner strategically separates the grotto-complex from the familiar contexts of the villa, dining and symposium, and theater. He, instead, creates a new type of theater, in which both artifice and nature compete and complement as the owner attempts to occupy a divine-creator role of a landscape. Isolated from both the domestic villa and the public shore, the owner’s manipulation of subverted expectations and grotto-as-spectacle seduce the visitor into the grotto where the owner puts his power, wealth, and intelligence on display.
Immersed in this grotto-landscape, the visitor occupies a space temporally suspended in which his own education and intelligence is tested against the owner’s. Both an actor and spectator and judge of his fellow diners and judged by them, the visitor explores the grotto to encounter the grotto-landscape in physical and mental participation and active viewing. Within the space, he realizes his mortality and divine power through assumption of various roles, a lesson that, despite his power, the owner also learned. This paper recontextualizes the grotto-complex within its larger landscape of burgeoning prominence and significance of seaside residences, at the historic first half of the first century CE, and within the creation of spectacle for dining and symposium contexts. To challenge scholarship’s limited focus on the four heroic groups, this paper introduces six additional sculptures as transitory objects encountered before immersing oneself in the alternative world of the grotto-landscape and upon exiting to return to the familiar. Consideration of the grotto-complex as a space reveals the owner, in his divine-creator yet mortal role, has strategically presented himself as the spectacle.
Table of Contents
List of Figures 1
Introduction 7
A Note on Previous Scholarship 12
Chapter 1: Architecture 15
Introduction 15
The Neighborhood 17
The Villa 19
The Nymphaeum 21
Exterior Grotto 23
Interior Grotto 27
Conclusion 31
Chapter 2: Four Heroic Groups 32
Introduction 32
Skylla 34
Palladion Group 38
Blinding of Polyphemus 40
The Interim 43
Pasquino Group 44
Conclusion 46
Chapter 3: Additional Sculptures 47
“Large Sculptural” Additions 48
Ganymede 48
Andromeda/Hesione 52
“Small Sculptural” Additions 56
Circe 56
Putti-figures 58
“Architectural” Additions 62
Venus Genetrix 62
Theater Masks 64
Conclusion 66
Figures 68
Bibliography 87
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