The very bottom level of the wall, below the ‘dado’, had not been given its final coat of plaster. So too, to judge from fragments found fallen to the floor, had the coffered ceiling. Although the uppermost levels of the room are now almost completely destroyed, it is clear that the very top sections of the wall had been finished and painted. One basic principle is – and it is not much more than common sense – that they started at the top and worked down. Thanks to the sudden interruption we get a rare glimpse of their handiwork before it was quite complete, and from that we can begin to reconstruct how they worked, in what order, how quickly and how many of them there were. The front entrance must be somewhere to the north (above). Its rear portions abut onto the Bakery of the Chaste Lovers. This house has still not been fully excavated. Compasses, traces of scaffolding, jars of plaster, mixing bowls have all been found there, as well as more than fifty little pots of paint (including some – mostly empty ones – stacked in a wicker basket in one of the rooms to the north of the peristyle, which was obviously being used as a store during the building works).įigure 10. They must have taken to their heels sometime around midday, leaving their equipment and paints behind almost in mid-brushstroke. The painters were in the middle of their work in the most impressive room of this part of the house, some 50 square metres, opening onto the garden. Piles of lime were found in the colonnades of the peristyle, as well as sand and mosaic tesserae and other flooring material in a dump near the kitchen. Major redecoration works were obviously going on. The main front door of this house, now known for obvious reasons as the House of the Painters at Work, must have opened onto a street to the north. Between the back wall of the garden and the Via dell’Abbondanza there stood – in one of those characteristic Pompeian juxtapositions between upmarket residence and the economic infrastructure – a shop and a commercial bakery (which we shall visit in the next chapter). What we have so far is only the rear portion of the property: a peristyle garden (described on p.87), the rooms around it, and a small entrance onto a side alley (Fig. Exactly how large, or grand, this house was we do not yet know, for it has not been completely uncovered. It seems that even the educated Roman hypnotized by the prevailing taste and fashion for Greek art was notoriously blind to his own country’s artistic achievement.On the morning of 24 August 79 CE a team of painters, perhaps three or four altogether, had turned up at a large house almost next door to the House of Julius Polybius to continue a job they had started a couple of weeks earlier.
Plaster painting pompeii free#
However, they are free variations upon an established theme and not merely straight forward copies, and they are now studied in their own right as paintings which are as Roman as the walls which they once adorned. They were based on Greek originals and in the 19th century they were often studied exclusively as evidence of these now lost Greek paintings. Mythological panel pictures were a prominent feature of many villa walls in Pompeii and Herculanium and could be termed ‘old master copies’. This was the great creative period of Roman wall painting and established the basis of most of the subsequent repertory of work. This delightful painting is an example of the late 2nd style that developed in Pompeii in the last quarter of the 1st century BC. Aphrodite engaged in touching her necklace, stares out at the viewer while Eros peeps around her shoulder, the tips of his wings just showing.
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