Roman Art

Roman Painting.

The arts whose proper medium is colour enjoyed a popularity with the ancients—Romans and Greeks alike—at least as great as that of sculpture, though, owing to the perishable nature of the material, the record is even more frag mentary. Etruscan painting in Italy reflected, throughout its early history, the phases through which the art passed in Greece. Thus the frescoes which adorn the walls of Etruscan chamber-tombs show an unmistakable analogy with Attic vase paintings in their neutral background, in the use of conventional flesh-tones, and in the predominant interest shown in line as op posed to colour. This probably was the style of those early wall paintings at Ardea and Lanuvium, which existed "before the foundation of Rome" (Pliny, N .H . , xxxv. . 18). It is probably also to an early date that we should refer those wall-paintings "in famous temples," of which Quintilian copied the archaic inscrip tions, but the first definite mention of painting in Rome is from the close of the 4th century B.C., when we hear of one Fabius Pictor, who earned his cognomen by decorating the temple of Salus on the Quirinal (302 B.c.). The chief works of specifically Roman painting in republican times (other than the frescoes which adorned the walls of temples) were those exhibited by successful generals on the occasion of a triumph; some idea of these paintings is afforded by the fragment of a fresco in the Museo dei Conservatori, discovered in a sepulchral vault on the Esquiline in 1889, which appears to date from the 3rd century B.C. It represents scenes from a war between the Romans and an enemy who may almost certainly (from their equipment) be identified as Samnites.

We pass from the meagre remains of early Roman painting to the decorative frescoes of Rome, Herculaneum and Pompeii, which introduce us to an art influenced like the contemporary sculpture by Hellenistic models. The scheme of colour is no longer conventional but naturalistic ; the picture is concentrated in space, i.e., figures are no longer isolated on a neutral back ground; difficult effects of linear and aerial perspective are at tempted and the modelling of figures is often excellent. It must be premised that this style of wall-decoration was a new thing in the Augustan period. In the Hellenistic age the walls of palaces were veneered with slabs of many-coloured marble (crustae) ; and in humbler dwellings these were imitated in fresco. This "incrus tation" style is found in a few houses at Pompeii, such as the Casa di Sallustio, built in the 2nd century B.C. but before the fall of the republic it had given place to what is known as the "architectural" style, in which columns and other architectural features are introduced in order to give the illusion of outer space, and this illusion is heightened by the landscape back grounds, which are often enlivened by figures. An example of

such decoration is afforded by the "Odyssey landscapes," dis covered on the Esquiline in 1849, amongst the remains of a large private house, attributable at the latest to the period of Claudius. The walls of one room were decorated in their upper portion by pilasters treated in perspective, through which the spectator ap pears to look out on a continuous background of land and sea, diversified by scenes from the voyage of Odysseus. The artist, it appears, has been mainly interested in the landscape which is sketched with great freedom, but he shows no scientific knowledge of perspective, and commits the natural error of placing the horizon too high. It is clearly to such works as these that Vitru vius refers (vii. 5) when describing paintings which "unfold mythical tales in due order, as well as the battles of Troy or the wanderings of Odysseus through landscapes (topic)." We should doubtless reckon within the same class those "small scenes from the Homeric cycle within a framework in which blue and gold are predominant" in a room of the beautiful house on the Pala tine, identified by Ashby as the doinus transitoria of Nero, and the numerous examples from the Homeric cycle at Pompeii (cf. especially the series in the "House of the Cryptoporticus" in Insula 6, near the newly-explored Via dell' Abbondanza).

The use of landscape in decoration is stated by Pliny (N.H., xxxv 116) to have become fashionable in Rome in the time of Augustus. He attributes this to a painter named Studius, who decorated walls with "villas, harbours, landscape gardens, groves, woods, hills, fishponds, canals, rivers, shores," and so forth, di versified with figures of "persons on foot or in boats, approach ing the villas by land on donkeys or in carriages, as well as fishers and fowlers, hunters and even vintagers," a description which exactly fits the continuous landscape of the yellow frieze in one room of the house of Augustus (the so-called "house of Livia") on the Palatine. Vitruvius, too, in the passage above quoted, speaks of "harbours, capes, shores, springs, straits, temples, groves, mountains, cattle and herdsmen. . . ." Existing paintings— those, for instance, of a columbarium in Villa Doria-Pamfili, recently transferred to the Terme—fully confirm the statements of ancient writers. In the villa of Livia at Prima Porta the walls of a room are painted in imitation of a park; from the villa of Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale we have a variety of landscapes and perspectives ; and in the house discovered at Rome in the grounds of the Villa Farnesina by the Tiber—the paintings of which are in the Museo delle Terme—we find a room decorated with black panels, upon which landscapes are sketched in with brush-strokes of white.