Laura Harris (University of Washington)
Docta Puella Picta: Experiencing Elegiac Poetics and Erotics through Painting
A collection of paintings originating in Pompeii and Herculaneum show women with writing tablets and styli, which scholars frequently employ as evidence of female literacy (Della Corte 1935, McDonnell 1996, Costabile 2000, Capasso 2001, Clarke 2003). However, the frescoes have rarely been interpreted as art in conversation with contemporary Roman literary practices (Meyer 2009). Given the inclusion of writing tools within the paintings, literature—particularly elegy, which was well known at Pompeii with canonical and apparently original poetry appearing widely in the graffiti (Milnor 2014)—is a productive lens through which to study these paintings. I argue that the paintings can be understood as a visual representation of the themes of Roman elegy, namely through the figure of the docta puella, elegiac treatment of gaze, and the motif of the exclusus amator.
I first argue that the paintings depict the docta puella of Roman elegy: a reader of verse and the object of the lover-poet’s desire. She appears here as a writer of letters just as literary puellae often do (Ov. Am. 1.11, 1.12, 2.2, 2.15), such that her tablet invites the viewer to interpret the paintings using elegiac methods. The pictures in medallion form (I.II.15 room 18, VI.16.15 room G, MANN 9084, ADS 537, ADS745) serve as frames or “paratexts” (on which see Valladares 2014) to the mythological paintings they surround and invite the viewer to “read” the central panels as literary, and specifically elegiac and epistolary, rather than generally mythological. The women’s positions—namely, their direct gaze and the pointing of their styli to their mouths—serve as a generic marker of elegy.
I then suggest the exchange of gazes between the viewer and painting echoes the elegiac understanding of gaze. Building on Maria Wyke’s identification of the puella as fundamentally literary and her body as synonymous with the text (2007), I argue that her captivating gaze makes the lover-poet subject to her eroticism and thus to elegy. In these frescoes, the puella’s gaze additionally makes the viewer subject to painting. Further, her stylus contains the threat that she might write about the object of her gaze—the viewer—turning them into the material of elegy. In effect, the paintings recreate the dynamic of servitium amoris between the painted puella and the viewer.
Finally, I show how the paintings position the viewer as the exclusus amator by denying them a view of the contents of the tablets and thus access to the puella herself. I conclude with some thoughts on the possibility of how a female viewer might react to these paintings using models of female viewership from Hellenistic poetry (Skinner 2001). Ultimately, this paper shows how reading these paintings through elegy and the docta puella allows the viewer to experience them as a method of immersion into the literary process and amatory dynamics of elegy.