Pathos formulas

The Zeugma Mosaic Museum displays a total of 2,500 square meters of Roman mosaic floors that were rescued by international archaeological teams from the city of Zeugma, which had been built on the banks of the Euphrates in 300 BC and destroyed in 256 AD, before the city was flooded in 2000. This is the largest mosaic museum in the world.

One of the most beautiful and best-preserved 3rd-4th-c. mosaics in the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep depicts the abduction of Europa according to the conventions of ancient images. Europa, the daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, is already sitting on the back of the bull that Zeus transformed into to seduce her. The bull swims with her towards Crete, and to make this more believable, its body ends in a fish tail. For the sake of symmetry, the left half of the picture is filled with a similar pair: a naiad – a sea nymph – sits on the back of a winged water leopard, which also has a fish tail.

It was absolutely not unusual in ancien art for any mammal to acquire a fish tail in a marine environment. The Romans knew from their literary studies that there was a hippo-potamus, a water horse in Egypt, which they imagined as a regular horse with a fish tail. And if there is a water horse, why should not there be a water deer, a water leopard, a water tiger or a sea bear? Vast is the sea, it hides many wonders. For example, the Arion mosaic floor of the Villa Romana di Casale in Sicily, which is roughly the same age as the Europa mosaic in Zeugma, presents us with a multitude of such aquatic mammals:

But there is a strange one among the pictorial conventions that is difficult to explain at first glance. What is the cloth that Europa holds outstreched, to be blown by the wind? And we see the same wind-blown cloth on the Sicilian mosaic above the heads of at least three naiads.

Roman art critics called this formula velificatio, which means velam+facere, that is, “to make a sail” (from one’s own clothes). ANd the one who makes the sail is a velificans. This is how Pliny uses this term in his Naturalis historia 36.29, describing the decoration of Octavia’s portico, on which Aurae velificantes sua veste, the Winds “make sails from their own clothes”. From this we also know what could have decorated Octavia’s portico, which, since the Middle Ages, was used as a fish market in the Jewish quarter, deprived of its original marble covering.

The formula of the velificatio had a double meaning. On the one hand, it suggested dynamics in the mostly static Roman images, which used few elements of movement. It suggested that the scene was actually in violent motion. On the other hand, by the fact that the wind that puffed out the cloth into a sail was actually miraculously blowing “from within”, it also suggested a kind of revelatio, that is, that the veil was lifted from the face of a person who should otherwise remain hidden: that an epiphany was taking place, the manifestation of the divine in this world, similarly to how the light that illuminated Renaissance and Baroque Nativity scenes emanated from the newborn Jesus.

On the eastern side of the Roman Ara Pacis (13-9 BC), the seated Mother Earth or the Peace of Rome is flanked by two nymphs with puffed cloaks, the allegories of  air and water, indicating that, with Augustus, peace had arrived on earth, water and sky.

Neptune’s chariot on a mosaic from Hadrumetum (Sosa Museum, Tunisia). This image also illustrates how the Romans imagined water horses.

Fresco from the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii

The formula was rediscovered from the Renaissance onwards (although it was not completely lost in the Middle Ages): here on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus

It is only natural that the Pre-Raphaelites, who imitated quattrocento compositions, also used the formula, as here in John Williams Waterhouse’s Boreas

Modern art history, starting with Aby Warburg (1866-1929), classifies this formula as one of the pathos formulas. According to Aby Warburg’s definition, the pathos formula or Pathosformel is a pictorial topos which, according to the common consesus of the time, should evoke a certain mood or emotional response from the viewer. We do not encounter most of these formulas in real life – such as puffed-up dresses above the head, or a number of Baroque gestures, because Baroque art in particular used such formulas – but viewers still knew exactly what they should feel when they saw these gestures, and which key the formula provided for the interpretation of the picture.

Pictures, even the most realistic pictures, do not depict reality, but use conventional formulas through which the viewer reconstructs a certain image of reality in himself. In this way, pathos formulas are still with us today, even if we do not pay attention to their unreality and do not reflect on the emotional effect they intend to evoke. To illustrate their persuasive power, let me present here that wide-eyed, wide-mouthed figure who, in advertisements, marvels at the wonderful quality or the wonderfully low price of a merchandise, in short on its epiphany.

In view of this figure, we know exactly how we should feel about the merchandise in question, and what we should do: go and buy it. Even if we never encounter such a facial expression in real life – the pictures have taught us how to interpret it. Although never say never: it is part of the effect of the pathos formulas that after a while the viewers also start to use them, since they know how the gesture will be interpreted by other contemporary viewers. Just as the passionate gestures of Baroque paintings became part of social behavior after a while (and not the other way around), or as nowadays we often react to unexpected news with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth. Not as if this were our instictive gesture, but because this is how we, taught by the ads, convey our astonishment to our contemporaries who also know the respective pathos formula.