Campus highlights
The House of the Vettii

A media rich, immersive environment to help students understand the life and culture of ancient Rome.

Title:
The House of the Vettii at Pompeii: An Interactive Exploration of Roman Art in the Domestic Sphere

Authors:
John R. Clarke, Andrew Otwell, David Richard, Denise Ketcham, Heather Matthews Supported by the College of Fine Arts and the Center for Instructional Technologies at UT

Central to the understanding of ancient Roman life is the analysis of the Roman house: the House of the Vettii at Pompeii is the best-preserved of these. It boasts a fine garden with fountains and statuary, and the highest-quality wall painting produced in the period A.D. 62-79. We also know that its owners, the brothers A. Vettius Conviva and A. Vettius Restitutus, were wealthy former slaves. The complex decorative program, with cycles of interrelated mythological paintings and sculptures, provides a unique opportunity for learning how the spaces in a house and their decoration encode the culture, values, and beliefs of both the owner and the different ancient viewers who would have had access to the house.

The objective is to get students to learn, through using this CD-ROM/website, what would take at least eight classroom lectures to teach; the social and cultural are learned interactively. Because the interface is both interactive and graded in difficulty, the student, step-by-step, learns how the Romans zoned the house for access in terms of the status of the viewer. As the student gains access to individual spaces decorated with painting and sculpture, he/she learns what messages these works of art carried.

A copy of the CD is available for viewing in the CIT multimedia lab.

click on any of the photos below for an enlarged version