Painting in ancient Rome

As with the other arts, the art of painting in Ancient Rome was indebted to its Greek antecedents. In archaic times, when Rome was still under Etruscan influence, they shared a linear style learned from the Ionian Greeks of the Archaic period, showing scenes from Greek mythology, daily life, funeral games, banquet scenes with musicians and dancers, animals, and floral and abstract decoration. Remaining examples of Etruscan painting come from funerary contexts, found in tombs in Capaccio Paestum, Orvieto, Tarquinia, Cerveteri and other cities. Etruscan styles of tomb painting was probably similar to the decoration of temples and public buildings. From the 5th century BC on, the Athenian classical style began to predominate in Greece. During this period painting accrued the technical resources and thematic spectrum that would later influence the Romans. 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. By the last quarter of the 4th century BC, the era of Apelles, the most famous of Greek painters, artists were able to create an impression of three-dimensionality and naturalism in their scenes. Often painting on portable wooden panels, these works spread throughout the area of Greek influence and became known in Rome. The most frequent themes were taken from mythology, followed by portraits and allegories. Less common, though not rare, were landscape paintings, erotic scenes, and still lifes. Between the 4th and 3rd centuries BC classical Greek and Hellenistic art exerted a massive influence on Roman art, through their contact with the Greek colonies in Magna Graecia. This contact was especially through military campaigns; Greek works of art became coveted war booty. Greek artists also began to move to Rome there in search of generous patronage, and adapted to the demands of local taste. File:Etruscan mural achilles Troilus.gif|Troilus and Achilles, Etruscan. Tomb of the Bulls, Tarquinia, 6th century B.C. File:Danseurs et musiciens, tombe des léopards.jpg|Musicians, Etruscan. Tomb of the Leopards, Paestum, 5th century B.C. File:Hades abducting Persephone.jpg|The abduction of Persephone, Greek. Royal Tomb, Vergina, 4th century BC. == Evolution and styles ==

In the transition from the Republic to the Empire, Roman painting consolidated and developed its own style distinct from the Hellenistic canon. The ensemble of paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum, ranging from the 2nd century BC to AD 79, has provided scholars a basis for establishing a division of Roman painting into four periods or styles. This division was defined by the German archaeologist August Mau in the 19th century, and is still used today, although it has been subject to dispute among art historians, because their characteristics are shared to some extent, making the identification of examples confusing and subject to individual interpretations, especially the Third and Fourth styles. The problem is further complicated by the use of archaisms and the overlapping of trends in late phases. Although the vast majority of remaining Roman paintings come from Campania and Lazio, surviving fragments from throughout the Empire show that the fashions of the centre were sooner or later assimilated by the regional centers in most of the empire. Nevertheless, It is known that the metropolitan style encountered a lot of resistance in some points in the East and in North Africa. Among the painters, few names have reached our days. Ancient bibliography cites the Greeks Gorgasus and Damophilus as the first known artists to make paintings in Italy. Gaius Fabius Pictor, a little later, was celebrated as a historical painter and the first Roman painter recorded in history, being seconded by Marcus Pacuvius, Serapion and Methododorus, at a stage when the elite could still devote themselves professionally to the arts without dishonor. From the 2nd century B.C. onward, Sopolis, Dionysius, Glatius and his son Aristippus, Timmachus of Byzantium, and Antiochus Gabinus stood out. In the Empire were Studius, Echion, Lucius and Famulus. No surviving works can be safely attributed to any of them, except for Famulus, who was given as the author of the decoration of Nero's Domus Aurea. However, modern research has uncovered some anonymous artists from certain groups of works that seem to have come from the same hand, such as the "Painter of Thelephus", the "Painter of Admetus", the "Painter of the wounded Adonis" and so on. It is characterized by the imitation of the effect of stonework, with the application of bright colors over plaster divided into square areas in relief, simulating stone blocks and their colors and textures. As Roman houses had few windows to the outside, the interior walls tended to be continuous, and the First Style seeks to emphasize this unity by creating integrated environments. In John Clarke's opinion, the dependence on surface relief for the visual efficiency of this style makes it more a domain of architectural decoration than of painting itself. Over time friezes decorated with floral patterns, arabesques and human figures were added, and other architectural elements such as simulated columns and cornices. By the time of the 1st century BC, this type of decoration had already developed in Roman territory a complexity and refinement that greatly distanced it from its Greek prototypes. The areas of color began to no longer obey the design of the relief, going beyond its borders and generating interesting illusionistic effects. The interest in color combinations contributes to increasingly dissociate the style from its structural origin, employing shades never found in real stone and eminently decorative geometric patterns that subvert the logic of architecture, which leads to the formation of the Second Style. Second Style '', Torre Annunziata 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. Its first Italian example is in the "House of the Griffins" in Rome, and its appearance coincides with the taste for ostentation of that period. ''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. The unified, solid effect of the First Style walls dissolves and rooms seem to open outward, offering views of cityscapes and gardens, evidencing a very correct use of perspective to give the impression of three-dimensionality and accommodate the visual recesses in the corners of rooms. Thematic decorative schemes based on the differentiated use of spaces also begin to develop. The large social meeting and repast rooms are decorated with preferred axes of vision that form complex scenes designed to create a hierarchically organized visual script, usually with a centralized main scene that unfolds into secondary scenes in the less visible parts. As the style matured around 60 BC this programmatic plan was further emphasized. Second Style painting required the integration of the work between architect and decorator, as extensive use of painted perspective could negate or detract from the effect of the actual architecture. The painter had to know how to handle a large repertoire of techniques to produce a convincing illusion in large panels that covered entire rooms in a unified scheme, and he also had to know the means of pictorial representation of a wide variety of materials and inanimate objects, including stone and bronze vases, theatrical masks, fountains, gilded ornaments, and glass objects. The design was developed in a smaller scale on paper, and then transferred to the walls through a grid system, sectioning the drawing and facilitating its enlargement. A celebrated representative of the Second Style, though atypical for the dominant presence of the human figure, is in the triclinium of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, an admirable series of scenes with people on a natural scale set against an architectural panorama that resembles a theater stage set. The scenes have a controversial interpretation, it may be that they depict initiation rites into the Mysteries of Dionysus and/or pre-nuptial ordinances. Although strongly figurative, the architectural influence reminiscent of the earlier style is revealed in the very statuesque modeling of the figures, with a secure and high-quality but somewhat rigid design, accentuating their monumental and rationally organized character. The ensemble is energized by the vibrant coloring and the variety of attitudes of the figures. The minimization of the importance of architectural perspective in this period allowed the painters a division of labor – the masters were responsible for the landscape scenes, while the architectural frames were the responsibility of subordinate assistants, which was also reflected in the salary each one received. The parietars (parietarii), the painters of the frames, were paid half of what the imagineers (imaginarii), the creators of the landscape scenes and figures, earned. 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. Painting acquired a dominant role in interior decoration. Whereas before complex figurative and polychrome mosaics were drawn on the floor, which competed visually with the parietal painting and made little hierarchical discrimination between the different surfaces of the room, attention now focused on the scenes painted on ceilings and walls, and floors began to be decorated with simple geometric patterns in black and white or discreet colors, which served as a visual resting area and directed the gaze upward instead of drawing it downward. On the other hand, the viewer no longer had to take in the whole at once, as was expected in the previous period, and could enjoy it in a progressive itinerary, as if strolling through a gallery of framed pictures, although the frames themselves were still fictitious, painted directly on the wall. The symbolism surrounding the owner of an elegant villa was also changing, and what was intended then was to show him as a cultured and discreet connoisseur of art, no longer as the exhibitionist patrician of the late-Republican period. In this period worked the painter Studio, whom Pliny reputed as the creator of the landscape genre of decoration – although the evidence revealed by recent research indicates that the genre had been cultivated longer ago. In any case his influence was enormous, and Vitruvius also held him in high regard. By this time the theater was also rapidly gaining popularity, and one finds many compositions showing actors on stage, while the themes of popular life likewise multiplied. The Third Style flourished until c. AD 25, when it began a transition of about twenty years to the Fourth Style. In this interval the flattened perspective again gave way to more striking illusions of depth. 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. Also important in the Third Style was the reaffirmation of the human figure, which in the next phase would be greatly explored. File:Villa-Farnesina22.jpg|Fresco at Villa della Farnesina, Rome. Second Style transitioning to the Third File:Villa von Boscotrecase22.jpg|Imperial villa, Boscotrecase File:Casa-del-bracciale-d'oro---.jpg|Garden Room: Ancient Roman fresco from the House of the Golden Bracelet, Pompeii File:Fresco-Boscotrecase.jpg|Villa of Agrippa Postumus, Boscotrecase File:Europa on a Bull.jpg|Europa riding a bull, fresco of Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum of Naples File:Römischer Meister um 125 v. Chr. 001.jpg|Scene from The Odyssey, Villa di via Graziosa on the Esquiline Hill, Rome File:Casa della farnesina, sala nera.jpg|Black Room of Villa della Farnesina, Rome File:Affresco romano - Enea e di.jpg|Dido and Aeneas, House of Citharist, Pompeii File:Casa-Lucretius-Fronto-Pompeii.jpg|Lucretius Fronto's House, Pompeii. Third Late Style Fourth Style Finally the Fourth Style appeared around 45 BC and, even more than its predecessor, can only be defined through the word eclecticism, recovering elements from previous styles and elaborating on them in new configurations. Some of its most obvious generic characteristics are an inclination toward more asymmetrical compositions, a tendency to use warmer and brighter colors, and a greater refinement, variety, and freedom in ornamentations. 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. Ling described the Fourth Style as less disciplined and more whimsical than its predecessors, being at its best delicate and dazzling, but in unskilled hands it could become messy and overloaded. It is the style of which we have the greatest amount of relics, and precisely because of the abundance of evidence it is the phase we can best study, but its evolution is made difficult to clarify because of its heterogeneity. Some of the first examples of the Fourth Style, still in transition from the Third, can be seen in the House of the Tuscan Colonnade and in the House of Lucretius Fronto, in Herculaneum, and in the House of the Mirror and the House of Menander, in Pompeii. Further noteworthy are the decorations of the House of Neptune, the House of the Golden Cupids, the House of the Lovers, the Imperial Villa and the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, the basilica at Herculaneum and the Golden House in Rome. , Pompeii 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. John Clarke proposed the subdivision of this phase into four main modes of expression – Tapestry, Plain, Theatrical or Scenographic, and Baroque – rather than a description through chronology, since several trends coexist. But the variety of solutions is very large, and this subdivision is not a unanimous one among researchers, many of them preferring to avoid strict delimitations in a context characterized by multiplicity. Nevertheless, a brief description of these types can shed auxiliary light on understanding the polymorphous Fourth Style. • The Tapestry type appeared before the others by about a decade, and then merged with the others. Its name derives from imitating the effect of tapestry – which had become a fashion in interior decoration – by establishing areas with independent treatment from one another and borders and stripes simulating bangs and brocades. The colors were also changed, with a diversification in the palette and bright, light tones becoming dominant again. • The Plana mode emphasizes the two-dimensionality of the wall, alternating surfaces of pure color with others showing scenes in delimited areas, and its effect is based on contrasts. This mode is usually found in less luxurious houses, it was simpler and cheaper, but a skilled craftsman could produce with it an impression of remarkable elegance with very succinct means. • The Scenographic mode has been associated with Nero, whose taste for exciting novelties and the theater led to the development of decoration based on theatrical sets. His Transitional House (Domus Transitoria) and the Golden House (Domus Aurea), two rich palaces he had built, were ornamented with such paintings. When the ruins of the Golden House were rediscovered at the time of the Renaissance, its decoration caused an immediate and electrifying effect. Many important artists of the time, such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, Heemskerck and Lippi rushed there to see what was considered a real revelation, many of them leaving their own autographs on the walls. As the ruins were buried underground, they were at first thought to be part of an artificial grotto (grotta, in Italian), and for this reason its decorative panels, extravagant and delicate at the same time, were given the name grottesque (grottesche), which became a Renaissance fever and were imitated for palace decoration in many countries. • The Baroque mode, as the word suggests, shows great exuberance and vitality and the treatment of the figures tends to be dramatic, with a technique of great freedom in the brush stroke that makes frequent use of the dashed line to create the effect of chiaroscuro and volume and elaborate color mixing. The scenes in the Basilica of Herculaneum, the House of Naviglio in Pompeii, and the Rooms of Pentheus and Ixion in the House of the Vécios are good examples of this trend. File:Pompeii - Casa del Centenario - Cubiculum - detail.jpg|Love act, Centennial House, Pompeii File:Pompeii - Hospitium dei Sulpici - Thermae - MAN.jpg|Musa, Hospice of the Sulpicians (Hospitium dei Sulpicii), Pompeii File:Pompeii - Casa dei Vettii - Triclinium.jpg|House of the Vettii, Pompeii File:Herculaneum-Palestra.jpg|Basilica of Herculaneum File:Pan hermaphrodite.jpg|Pan and Hermaphroditus, fresco in Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum of Naples File:Domus fresco.jpg|Golden House, Rome File:Pompeii - Casa dei Vettii - Pentheus.jpg|Pentheus, House of the Vettii, Pompeii File:Still life with eggs, birds and bronze dishes, Pompeii.jpg|Still Life with eggs, birds and bronze dishes, Pompeia File:Teseo liberatore.JPG|Theseus freeing the children from the Minotaur, National Archaeological Museum of Naples == Particular genres ==

Portraits Portraits deserve a separate comment because they were an important element in the Roman religious and social system. The custom of portraying the dead had a long tradition. 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, 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. When the use of burials became widespread, replacing the cremations of the dead, this type of image also became part of the sepulchral contexts.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. It was also in line with the ideological program of Augustus' time, which sought to express the idea that the Romans of the time lived in a world ruled by a divine will where order prevailed, an order that was preserved on earth by the divinized emperor. Many of these landscapes are commonly called "sacro-idyllic" because they depict a sanctuary or sacred monument around which various groups of characters gather, set against a backdrop of clear poetic and evocative qualities. Folk painting 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 this reason they are of great value for the understanding of Roman life as a whole. == Materials and techniques ==

The materials used by the Romans depended on the genre of the painting. The supports were wood, cloth (linen) and ivory for portable panels, and stone and stucco for mural painting. 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. If the artist used the true fresco technique, when pigment was applied directly to a fresh stucco base, the colors were limited by the chemical reaction of the materials with each other. Thus only four shades could be safely used – yellow, black, white and red, a pattern that had been enshrined by the Greeks – which were permanent, while other colors had uncertain durability. Even so, Vitruvius taught how to add extra colors after drying by painting encaustic over the frescoed base. Pliny, on the other hand, reported in detail several ways to obtain a wide range of gradations with just the four basic colors by using successive velatures with different shades. But there remain several aspects of the Roman wall-painting technique that have not yet been unraveled. Griffin says that mythological representations had a pedagogical and moralizing function above all, because "they were exemplary, because they illustrated and explained something of the order of the world and of the relations between men and the gods". Pliny said that the best painting was that which perfectly imitated nature, and should be as realistic and illusionistic as possible. Vitruvius, however, lamented that the imitation of nature was in his day being abandoned in favor of the fanciful. This may have been a conservative view, for other writers such as his contemporary Quintilian maintained that imitation by itself, though of great value, was not everything, and should be complemented, in a mature and creative artist, by personal reflection. 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. Thus, composing a work in which knowledge of important authors was revealed in visual citations from various sources was a sign of the artist's erudition, and served to increase his fame. == Late imperial painting and its posterity ==

After the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the late AD 1st century Roman decorative painting continued in a line that simply varied the plastic solutions of the late Fourth Style. 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. In any case, by the end of the second century the sense of solidity and the rationality of figurative architecture had dissolved. This led some modern critics to see in this phase a decline in quality, but the transformation may have simply mirrored changes in the aesthetic values of that time. There was also a tendency toward a lengthening and schematization of silhouettes, a use of more dramatic contrasts, and a partial return to abstract formulas reminiscent of the First Style. On the ceilings, the domed roof became popular, leading to the development of painting schemes based on diagonals or more complex geometries, with beautiful examples in the House of Painted Domes at Ostia, from the 3rd century. The collection of pictorial relics from the 2nd century onward, until the end of the 5th century, which marks the end of the Western Roman Empire, is quite sparse, but new images have appeared in various places in Europe in recent years as archaeological research has increased. 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.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. For them it was relatively easy to reinterpret the ancient myths in the form of allegories, and to apply them to the new cult, and in this sense pagan representations were still acceptable as a means of spreading moralizing maxims and as a link with the pagans in the common belief in an afterlife. 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. With the progressive rise of the prestige of Christianity, these elements acquired more weight in late-imperial Roman culture. The painting of Ancient Rome continued to exert a not inconsiderable influence throughout the European Middle Ages, also influencing the Romanesque and Gothic styles. By this time the mural examples and portable paintings were virtually lost to the medieval, but many ancient mosaics could still be studied, which were transpositions of pictorial principles to another medium, and there was still a good collection of ancient manuscripts available, with accounts of the Roman arts, which continued to instigate the imagination of artists, especially when the occasional presence of illustrations in illuminated manuscripts gave immediate references. File:Karolingischer Buchmaler um 820 001.jpg|The Four Evangelists, Gospel of Aquisgrano, Carolingian Renaissance, 9th century File:Villa Emo Grotescue 2.jpg|Grotesque at the Villa Emo, Renaissance, 16th century File:Villa Carlotta - Deckengrotesken 1.jpg|Grotesque ceiling at Villa Carlotta, late Romanticism, c. 1910 == References ==