(SOLD OUT / secondary market available on https://niftygateway.com/collections/yonat)
Pompeii, a city frozen in time.
Its marvellous villas adorned with beautiful frescos offer us an incredible glimpse into the story of an ancient civilization.
2000 years later, a new technology gives way to another form of time capsule. The story of this civilization is different, but love for beauty and art is timeless.
This is the fresco from the newly discovered Villa of the Digital Art Collector. The screen in the house is adorned with Greek gods and goddesses of art, beauty, innovation, commerce, insanity and freedom. Ethereal ichor flows in their veins, from the ambrosia and nectar they eat and drink, making them live forever… on the blockchain.
This piece is inspired by the beautiful frescoes found in Pompeii. It is a dialogue between the ancient and the temporary. Between beautiful frescoes, painted with the top technology of their day and an animated 3D version, minted on the ethereum blockchain, representing the top technology of today.
The frescoes found in Pompeii depicted themes from Greek and Roman mythology, told stories of the people living in the villas and sometimes portrayed them in their best attire.
The gods and myths in this piece were chosen carefully to fit a villa of a digital art collector.
Mercurius
The Roman God of abundance and commercial success, eloquence, communication and luck. A trickster at times, he was swift and clever, and his knowledge of major events often bordered on foresight.
Archeological evidence from Pompeii suggests that Mercurius was among the most popular of the Roman gods.
Daedalus, accompanied by the Muses Euterpe, Urania, and Calliope
Daedalus was a skilful craftsman and artist, who possessed superhuman ingenuity, extraordinary creativity, technical virtuosity, and superb artistic skills. He is the mythic hero of invention, the archetypal crafts-man. The Muses are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, lyric songs, and myths in ancient Greek mythology.
Dionysus, the three Graces and the food of the Gods
Dionysus is the god of wine, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity and theatre in ancient Greek mythology. One of the names given to him by the Romans was Liber, meaning “free”. His wine, music and ecstatic dance would free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful.
The three Graces or Charites are the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and goodwill.
In Greek mythology, ambrosia and nectar produced ethereal ichor that circulated in the veins of gods and made them ageless and immortal.
Hephaustus
Only one God in Greco-Roman mythology has a trade. This same god possesses great intelligence, and his technological productions evoke universal wonder. Hephaestus, the supreme master of metalworking, craftsmanship, and invention.
This piece is connected to a unique physical work.
As I have written in the introduction post to my NFT series, my work always starts as a physical piece and the dialogue between the physical and digital is a central part.
The wax tablet is the physical representation of ´The Villa of the Digital Art Collector´. Some of the most famous frescoes in Pompeii were portraits of the owners of the villas with their wax tablets. The hash ID of the minted NFT is written on the back of the tablet and signed by me.
Wax tablets were used in Ancient Rome as a reusable and portable writing surface for taking down students' or secretaries' notes to recording high-volume business records of transient importance. They are panels of wood, tied together, carved out and filled with pigmented bee's wax that formed the writing surface.
This replica was made from the cedar of Lebanon. It is a large evergreen tree that has great religious and historical significance in the cultures of the Middle East, and is referenced many times in the literature of ancient civilisations.
A stylus was used to write on the wax surface. One end was pointed for writing and the other end is flattened to act as an eraser by scraping the wax flat again for a tabula rasa ("blank slate").
The stylus is carved from Mespilus germanica wood, native only to southwest Asia and south Eastern Europe and grown by the ancient Greeks and Romans, beginning in the second century BC. Its branches are carved while still on the tree, creating beautiful scars on the branch, which is cut off 6 months later.
The three animations of the gods are all in 4K resolution and the longer animation is Full HD. They all fit a 16:9 display perfectly.