How were they made?
Vitruvius and Pliny wrote about how Roman painters painted walls. Unlike the Greeks, who tended to paint on prepared
panels that they later fixed to the walls, the Romans tended to paint directly onto the drying plaster.
Walls were faced in concrete first and then 3 or more layers of plaster were laid on top. The plaster was made of lime mortar
(lime, sand and water) mixed with marble dust, which makes a very hard wearing kind of plaster called STUCCO.
The Roman painters then painted pigments onto the drying stucco, so that the colour dried into the wall. This method is
known as buon fresco and is extremely difficult.
Stucco usually takes about 10-12 hours to dry and painting begins one hour into the drying process and ends with 2 hours to
spare which leaves 7-9 hours working time. Any mistakes made had to be chipped off the next day. Then the surface had to
be repaired and painting began again.
Later they often coated the finished painting with a layer of tempera (egg yolk) and beeswax, which dried into a varnish.
This protected the painting and also gave it a gloss.
What were they used for?
Roman houses were generally made of and followed a very simple architectural plan. In general the Romans lived at ground
level (though the poorer classes lived in tenement blocks) so for privacy windows tended to be small. Large windows require
lintels too, which complicated the design of the house. The rooms therefore were dark and claustrophobic and a good Roman
house was very sparse. There wasn’t much furniture or extras. Wall paintings were used therefore for three main reasons.
1. To make the room seem brighter.
2. To make the room feel bigger.
3. To show off – make the homeowners seem wealthier than they were.
Where were they found?
The raison d’etre of a wall painting is for it to be seen. Except in the case of lavish mansions and palaces, the Romans
generally decorated the more public rooms of their houses.
The main room of a Roman house was the atrium, which served as a kind of hall. It was usually square in plan and open in
the centre. There was a small pool in the centre to collect the rainwater. Apart from that the atrium was plain and sparse but
wall paintings were painted on the surrounding walls and sometimes they featured mosaic floors.
The triclinium was the dining room/sitting room where the Romans reclined on couches set in a square and were served
food by slaves in the centre. The walls of triclinia were usually decorated with wall paintings and the floor with mosaics.
In the more luxurious villas and palaces other rooms would be decorated but in general the best paintings were to be found in
the atrium and triclinium, where guests would see them.
Sometimes vaulted cellars were also decorated with wall paintings; obviously to make them seem more inviting and less
dank. The Garden of Livia, for example, comes from a vaulted cellar in the Augustan House of Livia, in Prima Porta: a
suburb of Rome.
Where do they come from?
Over the centuries the once beautiful Roman houses were demolished, ruined or vandalized, so very few examples survived.
Thankfully the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD79 preserved the interiors of the Roman houses in the region of Campania,
near modern Naples. Most of the surviving Roman wall paintings therefore come from the archaeological sites in the vicinity
of Mt. Vesuvius: Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae. Other examples do however survive due to special circumstances.
The Garden of Livia for example came from a wall in a vaulted subterranean cellar, which remained intact though the upper
stories of the House of Livia were ruined. The same is true of the wall paintings from the vaulted corridors of Nero’s Golden
House in Rome or the House of the Painted Vault in Ostia.
How old are they?
The Roman wall paintings on your course all fall into 4 rough styles of painting. Since most of the surviving paintings come
from Pompeii, these styles are called the 4 Pompeian styles but it is important to note that even paintings from elsewhere
fall under these styles too.
The Pompeian styles present us with a rough means of dating the paintings.
1st style = c.150-c.80BC
2nd style = c.80BC – c.20BC
3rd style = c.20BC – earthquake of AD62
4th style = after AD62 earthquake to eruption of Vesuvius AD79 (final destruction of Pompeii)
Exception: the House of the Painted Vault in Ostia. You can say this room dates to the late
1st century AD because it is painted in the 4th style but Ostia isn’t near Vesuvius.
How do you tell the styles apart?
1st Pompeian style c.150 – c.80BC
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Sometimes called the encrustation style
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Panels painted to imitate expensive marble or stone panels - Trompe d’oeil effect (trick of the eye)
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Walls looked like the lavish interiors of temples, basilicas and baths
[There are no 1st style examples in Wheeler]
2nd Pompeian style c.80BC – c.20BC
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Sometime called the architectural style
Painted architecture (porticos, arches, doorways, windows ) breaks the wall into zones
Zones often feature pictorial scenes: narratives or still-life
Trompe d’oeil continues in smaller panels
Subtle use of colour and shading creates illusion of spacial extension or perspective
Wall treated as a window onto another world outside, just out of reach but there!
3rd Pompeian style c.20BC – AD62 earthquake (covers the Age of Augustus)
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Sometimes called the ornamental style
Walls treated as blank canvasses
Large central pieces supported by smaller panels or vignettes (also used for pictorial scenes)
Often a monochrome (one colour) background helps to emphasize the scene
Architecture replaced by a sacro-idyllic landscape
Impressionism and Romanticism
4th Pompeian style AD62 – AD79
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Rejection of 3rd style blank canvas
Return of 2nd style architecture
Retention of 3rd style surreal landscape
Appearance of stage scenery
Fantastically Baroque (almost Edwardian)
Separate and fold the flash cards in
two then drill the information until
its automatic
The following are STUDY FLASH CARDS. I suggest you print them out and fold them over so tha the wall painting is on
one side and the information on the other.
Remember that they can only test you really on about four things and all of it is in Wheeler. If it’s not in Wheeler it
won’t be on the test.
1. Name/Date/Identify the wall painting
2. Describe the scene or comment on the use of colour/shading or explain how 3D is achieved
3. Answer a question that relates to the reason Wheeler included it in his book often with a quote from Wheeler.
4. Offer your opinion on how good it is (Hint: Say it’s good!) and base your opinion on what you’ve learned about
Wall Paintings in Wheeler or Explain how Wall Paintings were created.
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW IS ON THE CARDS
REMEMBER “Garden of Livia” COMES FROM JUST OUTSIDE ROME!!!
Both (above and below) come from the Peristyle Garden
in the House of Julia Felix in Pompeii, c.90-20BC. Usually
asked together with a comparison.
REMEMBER, ABOVE COMES FROM HERCULANEUM!!!!
HIGHER LEVEL 2012
(iv) (a) Identify the wall painting shown in Photograph H on Paper X. (5)
(b) This painting is a fresco. Explain the basic process of painting a fresco. (15)
(c) In your opinion, is Wheeler justified in calling this painting “a masterpiece”? Give reasons for
your answer. (30)
HOW NOT to answer this question
a. Garden of Livia
b. The ancient Greeks painted with eggs. They mixed the
paint and the eggs and painted on to their walls or
maybe their floors or sometimes onto the roof as well.
There were really quite a lot of ways to do it. A lot of
them used to do it at home. Not many of them though
ever got to do it in temples. Temples were only for the
rich people like Homer.
c. In my opinion Wheeler is justified in calling this
painting “a masterpiece”. Because it looks really nice.
I’d paint this on my bedroom wall if I could paint like
that.
HIGHER LEVEL 2012
(iv) (a) Identify the wall painting shown in Photograph H on Paper X. (5)
(b) This painting is a fresco. Explain the basic process of painting a fresco. (15)
(c) In your opinion, is Wheeler justified in calling this painting “a masterpiece”? Give reasons for
your answer. (30)
a.
This is called “The Garden of Livia” and comes from
the second House of Livia (Emperor Augustus’ wife)in
Prima Porta just outside Rome. It dates to the
Augustan Period: late 1st century BC to early 1st
century AD.
b. Roman wall-paintings or frescos were usually
carried out by Greek artisans. The artists used a
technique known as buon fresco, which has changed
little since antiquity. In fact it was the same technique
that Michelangelo used to paint the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel.
The brick wall was first faced with concrete and then
plastered. The plaster was composed of lime, sand,
water and marble dust, which forms a hard wearing
plaster known as stucco. The wall would receive two to
three layers of stucco first before painting would begin
on the final drying layer. Plaster takes about 12
hours to dry, so paintings were executed 1 hour after
the stucco was laid when it had acquired a little
consistency. Painting stopped about 2 hours before the
plaster set properly, so the artist only had a window of
about 8-9 hours in which to paint the whole
composition.
Mistakes were costly because the artist would have to
chisel out the mistake and re-plaster the underlying
wall before correcting it, so artists probably worked off
a repertoire of memorized scenes and motifs.
Paint is composed of a pigment (coloured
material) and a binder: egg tempora until the
Renaissance when Da Vinci began to use oil. The paint
used in buon fresco however uses the drying plaster as
the binder. Natural pigments are painted directly onto
the drying stucco and gradually as the stucco dries
the pigment is bound within the compound. The
Roman wall-painters used a variety of pigments.
Some like the brown and red came from local clay,
whilst others like the greens and blues came from
pulverized turquoise and lapis-lazuli, which was
imported from the Oriental provinces.
When the painting was complete and the plaster dry
it was usually varnished in a coating of egg tempora
(egg white) or bees wax to make it water-proof
preventing mildew and giving the overall painting a
glossy finish.
c. Wheeler quotes the famous Art Historian Berenson
who likened the pomengranites in this painting to the
work of Renoir. The way in which the colours are
blended in the fruit certainly resembles the way Renoir
painted still-life fruit bowls. Elsewhere however the
subtle blending of green in the foreground with blue in
the background creates a relaxing mood and the brush
strokes seem to suggest a sense movement as the
plants move to a gentle breeze. The sense of depth is
stylized suggesting movement instead of form. When
taken in isolation one of the trees looks, as Wheeler
notes, more like a cardboard cut-out but when taken as
a whole the composition works because it creates an
impression, not a scene, of a hazy summer day in a
vibrant garden. According to Wheeler this painting
could pass for the work of one of the impressionist
masters of 19th century France.
I think that Wheeler is right because if I didn’t know
better now, were I to pass the Garden of Livia in the
Musee d’Orsee in Paris next to a Monet and a Degaz I
would assume it to be the work of Renoir or Cezanne
but in fact this masterpiece predates the French
impressionist movement in Art by 2,000 years, which
somehow makes it seem even more priceless and
wonderful.