VIRTUALITY and PERFORMATIVITY Recreating Rome's Theatre Of

VIRTUALITY AND PERFORMATIVITY Recreating Rome’s Theatre of Pompey Hugh Denard alk through the narrow streets from the ancient temples in Largo Argentina to the open-air market in Campo dei Fiori, enjoying the Wcharacteristic Roman patchwork of architectural gems and mediocrities as you go. At the near end of the Campo, the seventeenth-century façade of the Palazzo Pio juts out (Plate 1), overshadowing a small courtyard to one side. Entering this courtyard you go past Pancrazio’s Restaurant, then follow the dark, covered passageway down a slight incline until you emerge into a sunlit street where the buildings curve around on either side in a wide crescent of faded Renaissance elegance (Plate 2). Taking out your guidebook, you discover that you are standing in the auditorium of the Theatre of Pompey—the largest and one of the most historically important and architecturally influential theatres ever built. Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar’s political ally—later mortal enemy—created this grand triumphal edifice in order to celebrate and commemorate his military conquests in three continents. Completed in 55 B.C. and consisting of a number of discrete zones, it served for several centuries as one of the prime playgrounds for the citizens of Rome (Plate 3). Not only was it a site of performance, it was also performative in its own right: adorned with treasures and costly marbles from around the world, it was an unparalleled display of the military, economic, and technological greatness of Rome, and of Pompey’s pre-eminence. A Senate House— or curia—overlooked present-day Largo Argentina. Its portico boasted a massive painting of a warrior by a fifth-century artist, Polygnotus, calculated to remind the viewer of the scope of Pompey’s achievements.1 Pompey would have been even more gratified by his creation had he lived to see Caesar assassinated at the foot of his statue on the Ides of March just eleven years later, in 44 B.C. (Caesar’s adopted heir, Augustus, later pointedly transformed the site into a public latrine.) A second section of the complex was a vast and splendid enclosed park—or quadriporticus—containing gardens, fountains, leafy walks, trophies commemorat- ing military victory, and sculptural masterpieces from around the Mediterranean world.2 Richard Beacham writes: © 2002 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. PAJ 70 (2002), pp. 25–43. ᭿ 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028101753401785 by guest on 28 September 2021 Plate 1. Campo dei Fiori looking upwards towards Palazzo Pio and the original location of the Temple of Venus Victrix. Photo: Copyright University of Warwick. Plate 2. Via di Grotta Pinta showing curve of Renaissance buildings constructed upon the Plate 3. Rome at the time of Constantine, including substructure of the Theatre of Pompey’s cavea. Theatre of Pompey (centre) and Theatre of Marcellus Photo: Copyright University of Warwick. (top left). Relief-model by Italo Gismondi. Photo: Museo della Civiltà Romana, Rome. Plate 4. Imagined view from stage of Theatre of Pompey up towards Temple of Venus Victrix. Reconstruction by L. Canina. (L. Canina “Cenni storici e ricerche iconografiche del Teatro di Pompeo e fabbriche adiacenti.” Dissertazioni della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia 6 [1835]: 3–37, one of three plates.) 26 ᭿ PAJ 70 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028101753401785 by guest on 28 September 2021 the Porticus Pompeii . quickly became one of the most popular places in Rome to stroll (Cicero. De Fat. 8; Catullus 55.6; Ovid Ars. Amat. 1.67; Martial 11.1.11). Within were rows of trees, shaded streams, and numerous fountains. [. .] Along the north side was the Hecatostylon, the “portico of the hundred pillars.” This great colonnade was festooned with heavy golden curtains from Pergamum and displayed a collection of statues and paint- ings, some hundreds of years old, works of outstanding merit and elegance (Pliny. N.H. 35.59) Adjacent to the colonnade was a grove of plane trees, and . along the south side opposite were possibly markets and shops. [. .] This park was used on the days of performance as a place for the audience to promenade between the entertainments without leaving the theatre complex or causing disruption in the streets, and at other times it provided a splendid recreational site for the Roman citizenry where they could escape from the summer heat or was used for amorous assignation.3 As Vitruvius, noted (5.9), this space could also be used to provide space for preparing the stage sets and machinery.4 Finally, the whole monument culminated in a grand, architecturally unified, theatre- temple (Plate 4)—the first stone theatre in the city of Rome. Although the theatre was built upon the flats of the Campus Martius, its highest point—the temple of Pompey’s patron divinity, Venus Victrix—was second in height only to the capitol (Plate 5). According to our research, the stage of the theatre was almost 290 feet across, and the auditorium—or cavea—may have accommodated some 25,000 spectators.5 Some years later, Nero himself performed upon this stage, 6 much to the disgust of the senatorial class and the delight of the masses. As late as the sixth century A.D., Cassiodorus, Chancellor to the Ostrogoth King Theodoric, described: “caves vaulted with hanging stones, so cleverly joined into beautiful shapes that they resemble more the grottoes of a huge mountain than anything wrought by human hand.” However, the theatre was clearly not untouched by age, and Cassiodorus also lamented that Time could “shatter even this solid structure.”7 But it is not alone size, architectural magnificence, or historical contingency that single out the Theatre of Pompey as one of the most important performance spaces in the history of Western theatre. When Vitruvius wrote his influential treatise, De Architectura, his account of how a theatre should be built was based upon Pompey’s recently-completed edifice; indeed, at the time he wrote, it was probably still the only stone theatre in the city of Rome.8 For centuries to come the Theatre of Pompey thus became the architectural Ur-text for the vast numbers of theatres built throughout the Roman Empire as symbols of romanitas: from Arles to Timgad, Caesarea to Athens. Again in the Renaissance, through the influence of Vitruvius, the Theatre of Pompey left its imprint upon such seminal theatres as the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza and the Teatro Farnese at Parma. This single theatre, therefore, had a unique role in shaping the characteristics of Western theatrical space—and thereby in conditioning prevailing conceptions of theatre and theatricality—right into the modern period. If we wish to understand the impact that these ideas have DENARD / Virtuality and Performativity ᭿ 27 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028101753401785 by guest on 28 September 2021 had upon theatre architecture, theatrical performance, and indeed theatrical innova- tion, then the story of this extraordinary theatre cannot be ignored. The archaeological history of the Theatre of Pompey is a long and curious one. So many other monuments of the imperial age have been “liberated” from obscurity or from the encrustations of post-antique structures over the years, but despite radical plans drawn up in the Fascist period (Plate 6), the Theatre of Pompey has been reluctant to relinquish its acquired architectural clothing. The result is that, today, the Theatre consists of numerous scattered architectural remains in basements of various buildings between the Campo dei Fiori and Largo Argentina (Plate 7). The task of interpreting these remains is made much more difficult by the fact that the ruins do not, themselves, offer a visibly unified object. For this reason, perhaps, the history of scholarship on the theatre has been particularly characterized by attempts either graphically to reconstruct the theatre complex as it might have been in antiquity, or at least to represent the extant ruins as a unified image (Plate 8). Yet it is astonishing to learn that, despite its great historical and architectural importance, there has never been a modern scientific survey of the theatre’s remains. Most studies in this century are based on the limited excavations and site-plans of Victoire Baltard of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, working in the first decades of the nineteenth-century, who himself was partly working from the earlier study by Luigi Canina. In January of 1999, however, a new chapter opened in the archaeological history of the monument when the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Board granted Prof. Richard Beacham (University of Warwick) funds to coordinate, together with Prof. James Packer (Northwestern University), a new archaeological study of the monument, and to create a reconstruction of it using digital, 3-D technologies (Plate 9). The Pompey Project will result in a highly sophisticated and integrated electronic resource, spanning the entire history of the site, from antiquity to the present. The application of Virtual Reality technologies to the Theatre of Pompey is a particularly significant development since extensive new excavation of the structure is no longer feasible. Moreover, as this area of Rome becomes increasingly affluent, vital archaeological remains of the theatre not infrequently fall prey to “development.” (In the relatively short period of our own work, we have seen opus reticolatum walls disappear under new plastering, and sections of the theatre structure become obscured by modern “improvements.”) So contemporary analysis of the site is framed by an ever-diminishing window of opportunity. At the time of writing, the Pompey Project has completed just over half of its work, and is well on the way to achieving its aims. In part, then, this article represents a brief report upon work-in-progress.

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