Painting in ancient Rome

Were it not for the preservation of Pompeii and Herculaneum in fairly good condition, whose murals are numerous and of great quality, the contemporary idea of the painting of both Ancient Greece and Rome would be based almost solely on literary descriptions.

Through a span of about a hundred years, generations of artists such as Polygnotos, Apollodorus, Zeuxis, and Parrhasius gradually developed techniques for representing perspective, volume, shading, and scenery, as evidenced by thousands of surviving vase paintings.

[18] The Second Style, called architectural, flourished relatively quickly from the First around 80 B.C., although precursor examples date from the third century BC and are spread over a wide region from Etruria to Asia Minor, where it was used in Hellenistic palaces to display the wealth of the great personages.

Trompe-l'oeil illusions become more effective and varied, with the multiplication of simulated architectural elements, such as colonnades, architraves, balustrades, moldings, windows and friezes, and more detailed and complicated geometric patterns appear.

[6][1] The late phase of the Second Style, from c. 40-30 BC, proceeds toward simplification, avoiding the ostentation of luxury in favor of more sober environments, fitting the austerity of Augustus' rule, not without the protest of some like Vitruvius, who deplored the replacement of the earlier solid architecture with more elegant and lighter models, which incorporate animal, vegetable, and human figure forms, along with arabesques, panoply, and ornaments of an abstract, miniaturized, and fanciful character, which suggests oriental influence.

The imaginarii had to master an even broader thematic spectrum than the Second Style painters, and had to be able to recreate historical settings from various eras and depict human figures in a wide variety of pursuits.

The scenes were reduced to small centralized panels, framed by elements of fanciful, even extravagant and irrational architecture, subdivided into compartmentalized areas, enriched with new motifs - wreaths, candelabras, thyrsus - elaborated in a linear treatment of great attention to detail.

In addition to these, the figures are more animated, the brushstroke technique has become freer, with intensive use of dashes for shadows and volumes, approaching pointillist effects, and the pictorial simulation of tapestries through the use of large areas of a single color, with ornamental borders and bands, is popular.

[27] Also during the Fourth Style there was an increase in the pictorial decoration of the ceilings, with a much wider variety of plastic solutions, much more fanciful than in previous phases, but with the predominance of centralized schemes that propagated in concentric patterns, and with greater integration between painting and stucco reliefs.

In the hearths of the residences, sacred spaces, effigies of the ancestors were installed as a perpetual homage, and in processions organized by the elites, family portraits appeared prominently, in order to attest their patrician lineage.

These effigies could be sculpted in the form of busts or heads, modeled in wax or terracotta as mortuary masks, or painted on medallions and shields, and used to present detailed physiognomic characterization, making one believe that they were faithful portraits.

Landscapes are sometimes thought to have been a product of Alexandrian art, inspired by the bucolic poetry of Theocritus and related poets, but no examples have been retrieved from that region, and everything leads one to believe that it is an indigenous Italian genre, although possibly influenced by Hellenistic traditions.

[40]But some experts do not believe that the Plinian statement is entirely correct, for recent research points to important precursor landscape examples such as the Garden of Livia, painted in her Roman villa, which, according to Boardman, Griffin & Murray, cannot be linked to Studio, but it is possible that he gave an innovative feature to a pre-existing tradition.

[5] This seems assured in view of the Roman preference of the imperial period for a depiction of nature where it was subdued, ordered and embellished by the human spirit, manifesting itself pictorially in the form of an interpenetration between complex architecture and formal cultivated gardens.

This association was already found among the Greeks, who conventionalized nature to serve decorative purposes - as the notorious case of the stylized acanthus leaf of the Corinthian capitals - and was a tradition also in the Near East, whose horticultural practices were imitated by the Romans and were, according to Woksch, subordinated to rational architectural considerations.

[43][44][45] The description given of the four styles of painting informs about the development of the great tradition inherited from the Greeks and Hellenists, of a scholarly character, but especially in the Vesuvian area many examples have survived that must be studied in the context of popular culture.

They mostly deal with local themes, with episodes from the real life of the population in their daily chores, others show processions, cult scenes, and images of gods, and others evidently functioned as advertisement panels for stores and workshops.

This heterogeneous collection often presents crude features, and its internal unity is weak, but images endowed with charm and very interesting naive qualities are not rare, as well as being authentic expressions of the voice of the people.

For Pliny, true painting was that made on wooden panels, and he regretted that this genre was falling into disuse in his time to meet the ostentatious fashion demands of the elites, who preferred the parietal frescoes.

From a large repertoire of figures and motifs left by the Greeks and Hellenists, they felt free to directly copy ready-made formal elements from various sources for the creation of a new composition, or alter them at will to satisfy the taste of their patrons, and this lends them an often unified character, which is especially visible during the Third and Fourth styles.

Fantasy was indispensable as when, for example, portraying the gods, of whom there were no known authentic prototypes, there was no "real" object that could be imitated, and so recourse both to imagination and to the authors of antiquity, who set canonical types, was compulsory.

Even with differing opinions, the aesthetic atmosphere as a whole throughout the Empire seems to have continued to place great importance on imitating the ancients for learning a formal vocabulary of time-tested efficiency understood by everyone in a vast region.

By the time Hadrian reigned, who was born a few years before Vesuvius buried those two cities, it seems that a different art was already being practiced in the Ostia Antica region, acting as the vanguard of parameters that would later become widespread, although the scarcity of examples of late-imperial mural painting makes it risky to state anything with much certainty.

Among the most striking features of the Ostian collection is an apparent disdain for the rigor of plumb and set square, which in earlier times had created convincing illusions of perspective and fairly exact architectures, to give way to free line drawing, quite outside of orthogonal coordinates.

One of the best surviving examples of late-imperial painting is not pagan, it belongs to a Hebrew context, and dates from the 3rd century, found in the synagogue of Dura-Europos, in the province of Syria, showing the earliest known depictions of Old Testament scenes.

See how so many gather from all parts and how they now gaze in wonder at the scenes with their pious but rude minds (...) Therefore, it seemed to us a useful work joyfully to embellish the houses of (St.) Felix with paintings on all sides ...[58]Moreover, at times this religion faced persecutions that prevented an artistic flourishing, and even when it was made official by the empire the most distinguished Christians still appreciated the classical culture and its formal models derived from paganism.

This association between Christianity and paganism was already visible in a veiled way in St. Paul's writings, where allusions to the majesty of Christ abound, and which were a clear transposition to a new context of the imperial apologies of Augustus' time.

Not surprisingly, in the Paleochristian imagery Christ could be represented in the same way as Apollo, the sun god, illuminating the world, as Orpheus pacifying the "beasts" (pagans) with his "music" (doctrine), or as a classical philosopher teaching his disciples the secrets of the new philosophy.

When Christianity received official support with the Edict of Milan in 313, a program of building many churches and basilicas began, whose internal decorations constitute the most important artistic achievement of the late Imperial period.

[4] Its great importance in the Renaissance has been discussed before and need not be repeated, but it is worth mentioning finally that in the 18th century, with a renewal of interest in the culture of classical antiquity and new archaeological discoveries in the Vesuvius region, Roman painting came back into the spotlight.