Look and (Don

Presenters

Max Meyer, Brown University

Abstract

Due to the prevalence of modern medical technology, namely corrective lenses, visual ability in the ancient world is usually thought of as a binary: one was either sighted or blind. This assumption forgets that optical conditions, such as nearsightedness, are transtemporal, yet modern technologies that ameliorate these conditions are not. Treating vision as a constant rather than a variable has produced a lacuna in scholarship where the experiences of individuals with nonnormative visual abilities have largely gone unstudied. When visual ability is included as a variable in the study of ancient material cultures, new types of lived experiences are brought to light. Such experiences add nuance to our understandings of ancient peoples, and centering nonnormative abilities, here vision, serves to remediate the influence of modern ableist assumptions in current theoretical and methodological frameworks. Using Villa A at Oplontis as a case study, this paper reevaluates the architecture and wall paintings of elite Roman villas on the Bay of Naples by considering how nearsighted vision changed, but did not inherently limit, a visitor’s experience and understanding of the villa. Through reevaluating spaces that defined a visitor’s experience, this paper proposes that the architecture and wall paintings of Villa A evoked both aesthetic wonder and disorienting confusion. The coexistence of wonder and confusion is not paradoxical. Instead, I argue that it allowed the villa, and thus its owner, to generate highly curated and immersive experiences for visitors. The mechanisms that produced these feelings did not necessitate that visitors have normative vision. Instead, I propose that nearsightedness changed, but did not limit, a visitor’s ability to experience the villa’s immersive qualities. Exploring nonnormative experiences results in new understandings of spatial experience and the visitor-owner relationship, and assumptions that nonnormative bodies were intrinsically disadvantaged are challenged.

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