Villa Del Tellaro

Recent excavations in the site of Villa del Casale at Piazza Armerina, conducted by Sapienza University in Rome and Kore University in Enna under the direction of Prof. Patrizio Pensabene, have been found the remains of the rooms of a frigidarium. This frigidarium is a large rectangular room, with a polychrome geometric mosaic floor, bounded on the north side by two small square rooms and a semi-circular bathtub for cold water baths with mosaic decorations. During the sixth century A.D the frigidarium had lost its function and was transformed into productive or  residential area.

Conventionally, images are interpreted through an iconographical analysis and, if possible, related to surviving texts explaining the significance of a motif. Incomplete or altered versions of the same motif are often conceived as being defective. This is especially true for images on Roman lamps, which in general are rarely credited with much meaning. As an alternative, I argue that lamp makers intentionally produced derivative series with only fragments of the modelʼs more complete scenes. Discussing a stock of lamps with the depiction of a butcher and other motifs, I demonstrate how such fragmented images remained open to a larger variety of interpretations and therefore could be fittingly used in many different contexts. It is the context of its use that is primordial for the reception and understanding of the image rather than some distant iconographical antecedent. Borrowing from the concept of "framing" in linguistics and communication theory, such context can be described as "frames", which besides iconography are of major importance for determining the meaning of images.