Pompeian Styles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pompeian Styles take their name from four periods of ancient Roman mural painting, first identified by the German archaeologist August Mau. Mau drew his framework from wall paintings excavated at Pompeii, one of the largest surviving collections of Roman frescoes. He lived from 1840 to 1909.

  He grouped the paintings into four approaches: structural, or incrustation, then architectural, then ornamental, then intricate. Each later style carried traces of the ones that came before it. The first two, incrustation and architectural, belonged to the Roman Republic and echoed Hellenistic Greek wall painting. The last two, ornamental and intricate, belonged to the Empire.

  So how does a painted illusion of marble give way to a painted window onto an imaginary world? And why would that fashion for illusion later retreat into flat, restrained ornament, only to grow crowded and complex again? These shifting fashions let historians trace changing taste across the late Republic and into the reign of Augustus, before catastrophe eventually struck the region.

• 2. Uncovering Pompeii's Walls

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  Around the Bay of Naples, in the very region Mount Vesuvius devastated, archaeologists identified many of the earliest known Roman wall paintings. Roman wall paintings turn up more broadly too, in buildings, private homes, and villas scattered across the empire. Some of these paintings preserve scenes of everyday life in the region before the disaster, which ultimately buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

  Nearly all of these images were frescoes, painted directly onto plaster while it was still wet. By the first century BC, painters pursued distinctly different approaches to the wall, some realistic, others impressionist. Their subjects drew on mythology, landscape scenery, and other everyday interests.

  Within a few generations, one of those approaches would harden into a fashion for painted stone that had never touched a quarry.

• 3. Stone Without Stone

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  In Pompeii, this style of decorating walls runs from roughly 200 BC to 80 BC. Outside the city, though, it reaches back to the late 5th century BC. The technique relied on trompe l'oeil, a trick of the eye that simulated costly marble veneering.

  Stucco moldings did the real work, raising sections of flat plaster so they looked like blocks of stone. Some rooms added suspended alabaster discs strung in vertical lines, beams painted yellow to mimic wood, or pillars and cornices picked out in white. Vivid pigment signaled wealth, so households of lesser means settled for combinations of yellow, purple, and pink.

  This style tracked the spread of Hellenistic culture as Rome conquered Greek territories, and some walls even reproduced Greek paintings outright. Dividing a wall into multicolored panels let a household mimic the look of expensive cut stone without buying it. Builders often kept this style on lower wall sections, out of easy sight, even after switching to newer fashions above.

  The Samnite House in Herculaneum, dated to the late 2nd century BC, preserves one well known example. The House of Faun and the House of Sallust in Pompeii preserve others, part of a style that spread widely across the Mediterranean.

  Above these lower panels, later households would soon paint an entirely different kind of scene onto walls that had once only imitated stone.

• 4. Windows Onto Illusion

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  By the 1st century BC, this next approach had taken over, replacing painted stone with architecture that tricked the eye. Early examples still echoed the First Style, but that older look was gradually replaced element by element. Columns divided the wall into separate zones, each element highlighted to pass as three-dimensional, a technique the Romans used widely.

  Marble blocks still lined the base of the wall, but the picture itself now sat on flat plaster above it. Many of these paintings built illusions of imaginary scenes, meant to feel like a window opening onto real scenery. Painters added everyday objects such as vases and shelves, along with items that seemed to jut out from the wall itself. The goal was to make viewers feel that the action in the painting was unfolding around them.

  This style relied on relative perspective rather than the precise linear perspective later developed in the Renaissance. Painted architectural features, such as Ionic columns or stage platforms, pushed the picture plane farther back into the wall. These illusions helped counter the cramped, windowless feel of small Roman rooms.

  Images and landscapes had entered the First Style around 90 BC and gained ground from 70 BC onward, alongside illusionistic and architectural motifs. Decoration aimed for the greatest possible sense of depth. At first these imitation scenes appeared only in the upper section of the wall. After 50 BC, they moved into the background instead, providing a stage for mythological stories, theatrical masks, or other decoration.

  Under Augustus, the style evolved further, with false architecture opening up wide painted expanses for elaborate compositions. A structure borrowed from stage sets took hold, one large central scene flanked by two smaller ones. Painters kept breaking up the wall with architectural elements or full scenes, until landscape eventually covered the entire surface with no framing device at all. The effect made a viewer feel like they were simply looking out of a room onto a real scene beyond it. This mature version of the style stood as the opposite of the First Style, breaking down the wall instead of reinforcing it. Aerial perspective gave much of this depth, keeping the foreground precise while the background blurred into indistinct purple, blue, and gray.

  The Villa of the Mysteries holds one of the style's most recognized works, a frieze depicting a Dionysiac mystery rite. The scene shows the Dionysian Cult, made up mostly of women, though one boy also appears in it. This fashion peaked from the 40s BC onward and began to fade in the final decades before the turn of the era. The architectural painting at the Villa Boscoreale, near Boscoreale, dated to about 40 BC, survives as one example.

  That fading fashion would soon give way to walls left largely bare, waiting for a very different kind of decoration.

• 5. Ornament And Restraint

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  Around 20 to 10 BC, this look answered the sparser style before it, favoring more figures and more color. It became known for a simple, refined elegance, even as illusionistic devices and figural scenes gradually crept back in.

  Its central departure was a retreat from illusion itself, unlike the trompe l'oeil devices of the Second Style. Strict symmetry ruled the design, built around a central element that divided each wall into three horizontal bands and three to five vertical zones. Slender columns of foliage wound around candelabra, or geometric motifs and bases, marked off those vertical zones. Much of the wall stayed plainly colored, and where decoration did appear, it tended to stay small. Delicate birds and half fantastical creatures, along with motifs such as a candelabrum or fluted appendage, populated the background.

  Egypt entered the decorative vocabulary after 30 BC, when Augustus defeated Cleopatra and annexed the country. Egyptian-style plants and animals began turning up on these walls as part of a wider fashion for Egyptomania. The paintings favored delicate, largely monochromatic linear fantasies in place of the three-dimensional worlds the Second Style had built. In Cubiculum 15 of the Villa of Agrippa Postumus at Boscotrecase, dated to around 10 BC, a delicate architectural frame surrounds a blank background. Inside that frame sits just one small scene, like a tiny floating landscape. Black, red, and yellow remained common through this period, but green and blue appeared more often than in earlier styles.

  This style lasted in Rome until around AD 40 and in the Pompeii area until around AD 60. Its favorite subjects were Greek mythology and sex, portrayed with little restraint. One fresco shows Priapus, the god of fertility, weighing his oversized phallus against a pile of money. A rarer subject appears in a fresco of about AD 50, showing an educated woman absorbed in reading.

  Barely a generation later, Roman walls would grow far busier again.

• 6. Baroque Return

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  Running from around AD 60 to 79, this style pushed back against the Third Style's mannerism in what is typically called a Baroque reaction. Even so, it ended up less decorated overall than its predecessor, while becoming far more complex. It revived large scale narrative painting and panoramic vistas, while still keeping architectural details borrowed from the First and Second Styles.

  During the Julio-Claudian phase, roughly AD 20 to 54, a textile-like quality took over the wall, with tendrils seeming to link every element together. Color warmed once again, applied to scenes pulled from mythology, landscape, and other familiar imagery.

  Busy compositions now filled the entire wall, giving each room the feel of a mosaic built from framed pictures. Lower sections still leaned on the First Style, while panels elsewhere carried floral designs. The Ixion Room in the House of the Vettii, in Pompeii, stands as a prime surviving example of the finished look.

  Among its lasting contributions, the Fourth Style pushed still life painting toward a new sense of space and light, relying heavily on shading. Nothing quite like it reappeared until Dutch and English painters revived similar still life techniques in the 17th and 18th centuries.

  This was the last of the four fashions Roman households would develop before disaster overtook the region.

• 7. After The Ash

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  Ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79, buried Pompeii so completely that the town was never reoccupied. Because Pompeii itself had no future occupants, the development of specifically Pompeian painting stopped there, frozen at the Fourth Style.

  Elsewhere in Italy, though, all four styles kept circulating. Roman painting as a whole kept evolving beyond the buried town's frozen record.

  What ended at Pompeii was never Roman wall painting itself. Only the strictly Pompeian chapter closed, cut short while the fashion kept moving forward elsewhere.