Art professor Bettina Bergmann believes that models of ancient Roman buildings, such as this one in the Mount Holyoke Art Museum, help modern viewers see ancient art as the Romans might have.		t may be easy to find ancient Roman painting--many museums have frescoed fragments --but it's hard for modern eyes to see art as the Romans did. Associate professor of art Bettina Bergmann says that's because the painted pieces now in museums were only a small part of a typical Roman room's decoration. "We tend to identify with the Romans, since we inherited so much from their culture," Bergmann says. "But it's important to separate ourselves from them, too. How the Romans shaped their environment reveals many differences between us and them." As a historian of ancient art, Bergmann tries to recreate what Roman painting originally looked like, no small feat considering that the finest paintings were cut from ancient walls to hang in museums. And much art still at Roman sites suffers ongoing pollution and weather damage. So while students of modern painting need only look in the nearest museum for their quarry, scholars of ancient Roman painting like Bergmann must collect and organize scattered information to understand the art's original appearance and purpose. Seven years ago, when Bergmann was teaching at Harvard, she visited the House of Jason in Pompeii (which was buried by a volcanic eruption in 79 AD). "As I walked through the site and tried to imagine the painted panels on the faded walls, it became clear that the best way to recapture the experience would be to reconstruct the interior with a model," Bergmann recalls. Since that day she has given imagination--a must for all who study the distant past--a scholarly boost by re-creating the interiors of Roman houses using three-dimensional models. They are based on Bergmann's knowledge of Roman life and art, on writings by ancient and modern visitors to a site, and on archaeologists' reports. "It's like a detective hunt for details and remnants you then piece together," she explains. The research is made tangible by modelmaker Victoria I, an artist and former student of Bergmann's at Harvard. Together they've reconstructed the decorative plan in several Pompeiian homes, a luxurious villa at Oplontis, and the Villa Farnesina in Rome. "I pick up where archaeologists leave off, and then put back what they have removed," Bergmann says.
Why make models when there are photos, CD-ROM images, and slides? "It's difficult to study art or architecture using two-dimensional images, because mosaics, paintings, and sculptures were considered part of the three-dimensional environment," Bergmann argues. "We're missing the whole by studying art in isolation." Models restore the big picture. Gazing into one, you can easily imagine attending a dinner party in ancient Pompeii. The room has bright red walls that also bear elaborate architectural and natural images and mythological scenes. As your dinner companions drone on about politics, your mind turns to the complex designs in the mosaic floor and the intricately painted ceiling. In the flickering candlelight, you muse about the connections among the designs and mythological stories in the frescoes and mosaics.
		Bergmann says models evoke this kind of contemplation by putting painting back into context. And that yields new observations about Roman life. "Models can challenge what we think we know from apparently objective evidence," Bergmann says. "Roman designers were much more sophisticated and subtle than they've been given credit for." Roman artists have been considered "mindless copyists who weren't sensitive about art and only wanted something that looked Greek," says Bergmann. But a model's decorative plan can reveal, for example, that images in banqueting rooms were arranged to be viewed best from the low angle guests had while reclining on dining couches. And images in rooms where people lingered featured complex stories to stimulate discussion by comparing and contrasting images and myths.
If that sounds like more mental effort than you'd devote to dining room decor, you're thinking of art in modern terms. Romans didn't consider paintings solely decorative. "Their sense of space was very different from ours," Bergmann says. "We have TV to engage us visually, and we tend to leave our floors, walls, and ceilings relatively bare. But the Romans used walls, ceilings, and floors as a kind of visual stimulation, something that would make them think. The models tell us how Romans created their environment, and also shed light on what they did there." Precisely because models help viewers visualize ancient life, there is a temptation, Bergmann admits, "to complete an image beyond what the evidence can substantiate." She is careful to avoid such fantasies. To remind viewers that models represent educated guesses, not exact replicas, for example, the top of models' walls are left unfinished. "Historians are always reconstructing the past, and this is one way of being self-conscious about that process," says Bergmann. "That's what's exciting about it for me." A growing audience is also excited about her reconstructions. Archaeologists and art historians have given Bergmann's scholarly presentations using the models a very enthusiastic response. She is finishing a book on the Roman art of landscape that involves extensive reconstructions of sites, gardens, and painted building interiors. And images of Bergmann's models are on display in Rome's German Archaeological Institute. The word is spreading about this new method of studying art; progress is slow, but then Rome can't be rebuilt in a day.