6 ms·

Pompeii archaeologists discover 'pizza' painting

29 points by neversaydie 3y ago

netbioserror 3y ago
I am continually flabbergasted by just how sophisticated artistic expression was at the height of the Roman empire. Light, perspective, proportion, detail, all over the empire can be found examples of works that contain all the fundamentals discovered later by the old masters. The Fayum portraits are especially arresting.
- polishdude20 3y ago
  I mean, if you think about it, humans today have no more innate intelligence than humans back then. We just have more historical knowledge of things. Many people that are great at painting now probably never "studied" painters before them. They just, experimented and practiced for years. All you need is the real world and practice.
  - camoufleur 3y ago
    Are you saying that painters become proficient (even great?) from copying from life? I don't understand what you mean here. I don't believe there has ever been an artist that hasn't been influenced by art, discussed art, and personally known other artists.
    - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      Art is innate to us as humans. Cave men drew on walls independently across the world. Children make the entire world their canvas. How is it some impossibility that great self-taught artists exiet, independent of others? Especially given the hundreds of thousands of years of human history? The billions of lives, trillions of human hours lived. You can say definitively that there has never been a singular artist born into a family of non-artists, who mastered their craft without any foreknowledge of those before him? Besides the general absurdity of your claim, how are you surprised that an artist can become great solely by drawing from the world around them? That’s how almost every single artist becomes great. It’s literally one of the most basic forms of practice.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sacnoradhq 3y ago
  The utopian mythology of hockey stick progress denies the existence of declines, both abrupt and progressive. The Romans had industrial scale milling in modern-day France, enough to feed 10-40k people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills Antikythera mechanism predates that by 500 years. I'm curious what technologies were lost for thousands of years. Roman concrete is essentially lost, Silphium is extinct, flexible glass, and Greek fire. Modern technology is lost in bits and pieces: Starlite is one example. Unknown unknowns are the most elusive.
jmclnx 3y ago
I would say that is a good assumption. The only ingredient I think not available back then would be tomatos.
quanto 3y ago
Pizzas are a source of national pride (and money) for Italians, so one could imagine they cannot be completely impartial about it. They may claim every chance of calling some flatbread a form of pizza. The word pizza most likely comes from the Greek word pitta -- what we know as pita bread. Naples was a Greek city for millennia until its own city-statehood and then eventual incorporation into Italy in the second half of 1800s. Naples had Greek food, and thus Greek's celebrated flatbread. By Italy's own historical documents, pizzas were neither a dish we know today (pizzas were synonymous with focaccias in Italy) nor a popular dish in Italy until American occupation of Italy in WW2 as American soldiers, who wanted their high-temperature coal-fired NY pizzas in their occupied country. Nat Geo has a piece on how the birth of Margherita pizza (thus modern pizza) by Raffaele Esposito in Naples was actually based on forgery of historical records by the restaurant/chef to promote its sales in mid-1900s. Italian experts and officials almost always repeat this thoroughly debunked fabrication and awarded an official government plaque. tldr; the original flatbread "ancient pizza" was Greek food, not Italian. Modern pizza originally was an American thing, not Italian. This is not to say Neapolitan pizza is a bad pizza. People of Naples should rightly be proud of it.
- namaria 3y ago
  If you go back in time long enough, Naples was Greek even before there was any notion of Italy. Any way you split the hair, the italian peoples have a true claim on the roots of pizza.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    It doesn't matter that Naples was Greek, as long as pizza as we know it today was a later invention. During the Greek influence period there was indeed a flat bread with toppings. That was popular throughout the Mediterranean, including Egypt. So, the question is mainly where to draw the line between what constitutes modern pizza, what constitutes pizza predecessors and what constitutes contemporary evolution of the modern pizza (e.g. pineapple pizza or deep dish Chicago style pizza, which is obviously a thing but it's also quite different from the original modern pizza). Fwiw in recent years I'm noticing a resurgence of the "pinsa romana" which is a variation on the theme and is gaining popularity likely because people just want a bit of change.
amanaplanacanal 3y ago
> But it lacks the classic ingredients to technically be considered a pizza. What do you need to “technically” be considered a pizza?
- ithkuil 3y ago
  It's a bit arbitrary. Enough people don't want tomato and so you get a "pizza bianca" without tomatoes. Enough people don't tolerate mozzarella so you've got "pizza rossa" without mozzarella. I guess that a pizza without both mozzarella and without tomatoes may be considered by most to be just a focaccia but I'm pretty sure somebody will point out some place in Italy where that's how they make the "true pizza" anyway
  - rufus_foreman 3y ago
    None pizza with left beef: https://www.thesneeze.com/art/loose_art/dom8.jpg https://www.thesneeze.com/art/loose_art/dom8.jpg
thessa 3y ago
I always enjoyed the story of early proto pizza appearing in Virgil’s Aeneid represented as the people so hungry they eat their plates. http://publish.illinois.edu/litlanglibrary/2020/07/23/the-aeneid-has-pizza/ http://publish.illinois.edu/litlanglibrary/2020/07/23/the-ae...
jacknews 3y ago
Is that a ... pineapple? lol

29 points by neversaydie 3y ago

I am continually flabbergasted by just how sophisticated artistic expression was at the height of the Roman empire. Light, perspective, proportion, detail, all over the empire can be found examples of works that contain all the fundamentals discovered later by the old masters. The Fayum portraits are especially arresting.

polishdude20 3y ago
I mean, if you think about it, humans today have no more innate intelligence than humans back then. We just have more historical knowledge of things. Many people that are great at painting now probably never "studied" painters before them. They just, experimented and practiced for years. All you need is the real world and practice.
- camoufleur 3y ago
  Are you saying that painters become proficient (even great?) from copying from life? I don't understand what you mean here. I don't believe there has ever been an artist that hasn't been influenced by art, discussed art, and personally known other artists.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    Art is innate to us as humans. Cave men drew on walls independently across the world. Children make the entire world their canvas. How is it some impossibility that great self-taught artists exiet, independent of others? Especially given the hundreds of thousands of years of human history? The billions of lives, trillions of human hours lived. You can say definitively that there has never been a singular artist born into a family of non-artists, who mastered their craft without any foreknowledge of those before him? Besides the general absurdity of your claim, how are you surprised that an artist can become great solely by drawing from the world around them? That’s how almost every single artist becomes great. It’s literally one of the most basic forms of practice.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sacnoradhq 3y ago
The utopian mythology of hockey stick progress denies the existence of declines, both abrupt and progressive. The Romans had industrial scale milling in modern-day France, enough to feed 10-40k people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills Antikythera mechanism predates that by 500 years. I'm curious what technologies were lost for thousands of years. Roman concrete is essentially lost, Silphium is extinct, flexible glass, and Greek fire. Modern technology is lost in bits and pieces: Starlite is one example. Unknown unknowns are the most elusive.

jmclnx 3y ago

I would say that is a good assumption. The only ingredient I think not available back then would be tomatos.

quanto 3y ago

Pizzas are a source of national pride (and money) for Italians, so one could imagine they cannot be completely impartial about it. They may claim every chance of calling some flatbread a form of pizza. The word pizza most likely comes from the Greek word pitta -- what we know as pita bread. Naples was a Greek city for millennia until its own city-statehood and then eventual incorporation into Italy in the second half of 1800s. Naples had Greek food, and thus Greek's celebrated flatbread. By Italy's own historical documents, pizzas were neither a dish we know today (pizzas were synonymous with focaccias in Italy) nor a popular dish in Italy until American occupation of Italy in WW2 as American soldiers, who wanted their high-temperature coal-fired NY pizzas in their occupied country. Nat Geo has a piece on how the birth of Margherita pizza (thus modern pizza) by Raffaele Esposito in Naples was actually based on forgery of historical records by the restaurant/chef to promote its sales in mid-1900s. Italian experts and officials almost always repeat this thoroughly debunked fabrication and awarded an official government plaque. tldr; the original flatbread "ancient pizza" was Greek food, not Italian. Modern pizza originally was an American thing, not Italian. This is not to say Neapolitan pizza is a bad pizza. People of Naples should rightly be proud of it.

namaria 3y ago
If you go back in time long enough, Naples was Greek even before there was any notion of Italy. Any way you split the hair, the italian peoples have a true claim on the roots of pizza.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  It doesn't matter that Naples was Greek, as long as pizza as we know it today was a later invention. During the Greek influence period there was indeed a flat bread with toppings. That was popular throughout the Mediterranean, including Egypt. So, the question is mainly where to draw the line between what constitutes modern pizza, what constitutes pizza predecessors and what constitutes contemporary evolution of the modern pizza (e.g. pineapple pizza or deep dish Chicago style pizza, which is obviously a thing but it's also quite different from the original modern pizza). Fwiw in recent years I'm noticing a resurgence of the "pinsa romana" which is a variation on the theme and is gaining popularity likely because people just want a bit of change.

amanaplanacanal 3y ago

> But it lacks the classic ingredients to technically be considered a pizza. What do you need to “technically” be considered a pizza?

ithkuil 3y ago
It's a bit arbitrary. Enough people don't want tomato and so you get a "pizza bianca" without tomatoes. Enough people don't tolerate mozzarella so you've got "pizza rossa" without mozzarella. I guess that a pizza without both mozzarella and without tomatoes may be considered by most to be just a focaccia but I'm pretty sure somebody will point out some place in Italy where that's how they make the "true pizza" anyway
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  None pizza with left beef: https://www.thesneeze.com/art/loose_art/dom8.jpg https://www.thesneeze.com/art/loose_art/dom8.jpg

thessa 3y ago

I always enjoyed the story of early proto pizza appearing in Virgil’s Aeneid represented as the people so hungry they eat their plates. http://publish.illinois.edu/litlanglibrary/2020/07/23/the-aeneid-has-pizza/ http://publish.illinois.edu/litlanglibrary/2020/07/23/the-ae...

jacknews 3y ago

Is that a ... pineapple? lol