Masks seller in Pompeii (1875)

Signed and dated lower left: “C. Mariani 1875”

Provenance: private collection

Bibliography: G. Berardi, I pittori archeologi nella Roma postunitaria e il signor Goupil, in Alma-Tadema e la nostalgia dell’antico, exhibition catalogue edited by E. Querci and S. De Caro (Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, 2007), Milan, Electa, pp. 104 (ill.), 106.

Cesare Mariani was one of the most prominent Roman painters in the second half of the nineteenth century, not primarily due to factors related to commercial success – which he also had -, but because of the many important public commissions he was awarded, in particular from ecclesiastical clients, which turned him into one of the main artists of religious subjects in Rome, in decorative fresco cycles and often also involved on restoration sites. Examples of this, in Rome, are his works in Santa Maria in Monticelli, Santa Lucia del Gonfalone, San Paolo Fuori le Mura (1857-1860), San Lorenzo Fuori Le Mura and, outside the capital, in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Teramo, where he also worked as an architect, designing the building. Furthermore, his decorative work in civil construction, noble palaces, theatres and state buildings are both numerous and significant; for example, he created the frescoes for the Sala della Maggioranza of the Ministry of Finance (1879).

Raffaello Ojetti, the architect father of the more renowned critic Ugo, dedicated a first biography to him as early as 1872, when Mariani was 46 years old, had recently been nominated Knight of the Crown of Italy and received, that same year, the Cross of the Order of the Rose by the Emperor of Brazil.

Alongside his ecclesiastical and public commissions, in which, after his initial inclination as a purist, his debt towards the classics and the tradition of the Renaissance masters can be felt, Mariani dedicated himself to easel painting, to landscapes – even in small studios (see the works at the Museum of Rome in Palazzo Braschi) -, and to genre painting, experimenting several times with neo-Pompeian subjects. While a first painting on this subject was presented by Mariani at the Florence exhibition in 1861 (Indovina, sketch at the Museum of Rome, Palazzo Braschi), it was in the seventies that he appeared to devote himself more frequently to the scenes of everyday life in ancient Rome and Pompeii, which Edward Bulwer-Lytton had helped to evoke in the collective imagination in his famous peplum novel entitled The last days of Pompeii (1834). Less than thirty years after the extraordinary invention of the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli – who had made casts of the bodies trapped under the ash -, he pulverised eighteen centuries of history, making the Vesuvian tragedy seem close and very alive and arousing profound empathy, thereby helping to fuel the imagination of artists.

Mariani indulges in greater liveliness and fluency in his archaeological works, almost finding enjoyable compensation for the more demanding, dull pictorial cycles requested of him, continuously, throughout his entire life. The subject of the Venditore di maschere commented here, dated 1875, was later replicated, with some changes, in the work exhibited in 1879 at the exhibition of the Roman Società Amatori e Cultori under the title Il venditore di maschere pompeiane and reproduced in “Illustrazione Italiana” that same year[1] (fig. 1); an article in “Cosmos Catholicus” from 1901[2], written after the artist’s death, shows another oil painting, differing in numerous details, indicated as “unfinished” (fig. 2), which demonstrates an ongoing interest for this subject.

On a sunny summer day, two Roman women – perhaps involved to the world of theatre, since they are accompanied by a very young slave carrying a cithara – draw close to the shop of a mask seller, intrigued by the goods and perhaps interested in buying. The old craftsman, bare-chested, rendered with Velazquez-like features and highlights – but the reference could also be taken from the style of the Spaniard Mariano Fortuny -, shows a possible purchase, while other masks of different colours and expressions hang, their mouths wide open and their gazes fixed, attached to a thread and resting on the marble counter; still others can be glimpsed, neatly stacked on the shelves, in the dark back of the shop. The theatres of ancient Rome, like the Greek ones, were characterised by the use of masks, made of wood or canvas, complete with false hair, which through the colours of the complexion and the expressions designated the gender of the actor and their role in the spectacle. Masks are a recurring presence in Roman frescoes, clay and marble artefacts and mosaics. The specimen from the Capitoline Museums in Rome, excavated in 1824 in the Jesuit Vineyard on the Aventine Hill, is renowned, with the tragic and comic masks side-by-side (fig. 3), and Mariani based his Venditore di maschere on that very find, as clarified by one of his drawings depicting the mosaic, with the words on the back “schizzo per Il venditore di maschere a Pompei” (fig. 4)[3]

Due to their evident evocative qualities, masks are often included in the paintings of the so-called archaeological painters and although Mariani also carefully studied ancient architectural details, furnishings and objects, he did not seem to have a strictly philological approach and did not seek to recreate a specific setting, recognisable through expressly mentioned details. Rather, he created a plausible context that made the scene portrayed both credible and inviting. Hence, in Venditore di maschere, in order to enrich the street scene, he inserted a painted altar which appears to have the shape and motifs of a domestic lararium: dedicated to the cult of dead ancestors and an inevitable presence in every Roman domus, the lararium was, for obvious reasons, absent on public roads, where, nevertheless, frescoes with snakes serving as protection against the evil eye could be found near houses and shops.

Other works dedicated to tranches de vie of Roman antiquity are known thanks to the market (Allegoria della Commedia antica, 1873, The flower maidens, 1874, Gelosia), while in 1880 the artist presented Il gioco degli astragali at the annual Promotrice. In each of these works, he poured his qualities as a decorator and highly skilled painter, creating eminently enjoyable scenes, which undoubtedly captured the bourgeois public, which was eager, through the “passing illusion of the current events of a remote past”[4], to identify with psychological and sentimental dynamics that seemed so surprisingly close.

Eugenia Querci 

[1] “L’Illustrazione Italiana”, a. VI, no. 35, 31 August 1879.

[2] P.I.M., Cesare Mariani, in “Cosmos Catholicus”, a, III, no. 20, 31 October 1901, p. 634.

[3] Published in Cesare Mariani (1826-1901). Dai primi studi ai bozzetti per la Sala della Maggioranza, exhibition catalogue (Rome, Galleria d’arte F. Russo, 24 March -20 April 2001) edited by C. Virno, M. Berri, Rome 2001, no. 120, p. 96.

[4] Cit. in G. Berardi, I “pittori archeologi” nella Roma postunitaria e il signor Goupil, in E. Querci, S. De Caro, Alma-Tadema e la nostalgia dell’antico, exhibition catalogue (Naples, Museo archeologico Nazionale 2007-2008), Electa 2007, p. 105.