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Villa Boscoreale is a name given to any of several discovered in the district of Boscoreale, Italy. They were all buried and preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, along with Pompeii and Herculaneum. The only one visible in situ today is the Villa Regina, the others being reburied soon after their discovery. Although these villas can be classified as "rustic" ( villae rusticae) rather than of otium due to their agricultural sections and sometimes lack of the most luxurious amenities, they were often embellished with extremely luxurious decorations such as Fresco, testifying to the wealth of the owners. Among the most important finds are the exquisite frescoes from the Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor and the sumptuous Boscoreale Treasure of the Villa della Pisanella, which is now displayed in several major museums.
In Roman times this area, like the whole of Campania, was agricultural despite its proximity to cities including Pompeii, and specialised in wine and olive oil.Hornblower, Simon and Antony Spawforth. Oxford Classical Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press, 1996. 254.
Information on, and objects from, the villas can also be seen in the nearby Antiquarium di Boscoreale.
Large quantities of pottery and farm implements were found. Plaster casts of the original entrance doors were made from the hollow spaces left. A plaster cast of a pig found here and killed in the catastrophe was also made.
It also includes preserved parts of a wine press. Near the center of the villa is the wine cellar in which 18 dolium, of total capacity 10,000 liters, were buried for storing the must from the adjoining press.
An unusual find was an oil lamp dating from the 3-5th c. AD showing that the place was tunnelled into in the later Roman era.
Evidence in Clay tablet and graffiti shows that the house was probably built around 40-30 BC."The Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin Winter 1987-88: 17-36. The villa was privately discovered, excavated, partially dismantled and reburied in 1900.
The villa had three stories, complete with a bath suite and an underground passage to a stable and agricultural buildings, the latter not excavated. The central ground floor of the living quarters consisted of over thirty rooms or enclosures surrounding a peristyle. The building featured an impressive main entrance approached by five broad steps leading to a colonnaded Courtyard rather than the typical atrium.
Ownership of the villa has been contested. While there is no doubt P. Fannius Synistor did reside there, excavated bronze tablets show another name, that of Lucius Herennius Florus. Many things were marked with seals in ancient Rome to indicate possession. It is believed that since the tablet with the letters "L. HER. FLO" on it was found inside the villa, it must serve as a mark of villa ownership.Milne, Margerie J. "A Bronze Stamp from Boscoreale." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 09. 1930: 188-190. These two are the only confirmed owners in the early 1st century BC and 1st century AD, though there may have been earlier owners.
Most of the figures in the frescoes have characteristics of Greek Hellenistic art or Classicism. For instance, those found in the living room appear to be depictions of either philosophers, such as Epicurus, Zeno or Menedemus, or possibly old kings, like King Kinyras of Cyprus."The Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale" p. 29 Similarly, the bedrooms of the Second Style also evoke Hellenistic qualities, such as are seen at the Tomb of Lyson or at Kallikles."The Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale" p. 31 At a time when the Roman Republic was ending and classicism somewhat fading, this is considered as an interesting comment on style and taste. Seemingly, Greek representations in the home were considered acceptable, even admired and sophisticated. The images survived the quick succession of Vesuvian cataclysms because of the skill of the fresco work and the absence of organic materials such as indigo, murex purple, red Rose madder among its pigments. The reddening of some of its yellow ochre shows temperatures to have exceeded 300 °C.Rudolf Meyer, "The Conservation of the Frescoes from Boscoreale in the Metropolitan Museum, in Roman Frescoes from Boscoreale.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, together with King's College, London, is building a virtual model of the Villa, linking the scattered frescoes, based on the notes and plan drawn at the time of excavation by archaeologist Felice Barnabei (1902), photographs taken of the excavation, the research of Phyllis W. Lehmann (1953) and axonometric drawings of the plan, locating the images on the walls, by Maxwell Anderson (1987).Bettina Bergmann et al., Roman Frescoes from Boscoreale: The Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor in Reality and Virtual Reality (Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 62.4 Spring). This, the most recent work on the Villa, is the main source for information not otherwise attributed.
Distance in these paintings is built up through a series of orthogonal architectural surfaces, and indicated by overlap Occultation, foreshortening, diminution, pronounced aerial perspective, but without consistent . Modelling is indicated by side-shading with slight, selective cast shadow. Pompeian red in front planes, contrasting with the blue tone of the fainter, further planes, provides an additional effective cue for depth. The room had one, north-facing, outside window, through which pyroclastic flows from Vesuvius appear to have entered. As part of the sophisticated depictive scheme, the dado or lower parts of the walls are depicted as themselves, but in First Style. Ledges and niches there show near objects: "metal and glass vases on shelves and tables appearing to project out from the wall", playfully belying the common impression that perspective is always for depicting recession from the picture plane."The Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale" p. 21 In other parts of the Villa there are brightly coloured non-figurative walls, in First Style, some of which are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre Museum.
In 1894 excavations brought to light a villa rustica covering 1000 m2 with clearly defined residential sector with baths and a pars rustica with farm buildings and warehouses. The breeding of farmyard animals was practiced and most of the rooms on the ground floor were used for processing and conservation of oil, wine and cereals.
The majority of portable belongings seems to have still been in place, though some objects were unlikely to be in the locations of their intended use: while many chests and wardrobes held stored furnishings, some material may have been brought in for temporary storage, such as two bronze bathtubs decorated with lion heads handles that had no obvious destination in the bathing complex, one of which even being too large to fit through the last door. In a large chest were forty keys and silver tableware; in the kitchen the skeleton of a dog on a chain; in the stable the bones of several tethered horses, one of which had managed to wriggle out and escape. In the olive pressing-room ( torcularium) the first three human skeletons came to light, including that of a woman, possibly the mistress of the house, who wore splendid gold earrings with topaz jewels,Egon Caesar Conte Corti, The Destruction and Resurrection of Pompeii and Herculaneum Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951 and as the subject of much romanticization has been called the last owner, Maxima, which is a name written on many of the silver vessels. Some have speculated that the previous owner of the villa was L. Caecilius Lucundus, a banker from Pompeii, who inherited the wealth of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in Campania, who was the father of the hypothetical Maxima.
In 1895 in the torcularium the magnificent so-called Boscoreale Treasure was found in a chest and consisted of 102 items: silver tableware, bracelets, earrings, rings, a double gold chain. A thousand gold coins were still in the remains of a leather bag. At the time of the eruption it was probably one of the safest rooms in the villa where the owner gave the order to a trusted man to hide it for better times. All the treasures were smuggled out to France via the Rothschild Family and sold.
The excavations of the villa were resumed in 1896 by Angiolo Pasqui.
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