![]() ![]() ![]() Often, the plaster on the wall is molded into raised backs, adding to the so-called marbleizing effect. This style is identified by colorful blocks painted on the wall to resemble large marble slabs. The first of the four styles is called Incrustation and dates back from 200 to 60 B.C. The four styles are divided both chronologically and according to certain defining traits. From excavations of such frescoes, art historians have defined four styles of fresco wall paintings. The majority of ancient Roman frescoes are found in Pompeii and surrounding cities thanks to the preserving effect of Mount Vesuvius eruption. While this plaster is still wet, pigments are applied in the desired design so as to create a painting that is actually part of the wall. A fresco is made by first preparing the wall with 1-3 coats of mortar (a lime and sand mix), then covering that with 1-3 coats of lime mixed with finely powdered marble. Romans used wall paintings as a way to open up and lighten their space. Some Roman houses were very dark and didnt even have windows. In ancient Rome, domestic interiors were often small and claustrophobic. It is an example of the fourth style of Roman wall paintings. This panel is from a room in the House of Vetti. This wall from the House of Vettii is an example of third style wall painting. ![]() This room, in the Villa of Oplontis, is decorated with second style frescoes. ![]() This is an example of a first style wall as seen in the Samnite House. (Pl.NH XXXV.120) Some of the best examples of Fourth Style painting come from the House of the Vettii which can also be visited in Pompeii today.Historical Background of the Site or Topic In describing what we now call the Fourth Style, Pliny the Elder said that it was developed by a rather eccentric, albeit talented, painter named Famulus who decorated Nero’s famous Golden Palace. The Fourth Style also incorporates central panel pictures, although on a much larger scale than in the third style and with a much wider range of themes, incorporating mythological, genre, landscape and still life images. Faux marble blocks along the base of the walls, as in the First Style, frame the naturalistic architectural scenes from the Second Style, which in turn combine with the large flat planes of color and slender architectural details from the Third Style. It can be best described as a combination of the three styles that came before. and is seen in Pompeii until the city’s destruction in 79 C.E. The Fourth Style, what Mau calls the “Intricate Style,” became popular in the mid-first century C.E. The Roman architect Vitruvius was certainly not a fan of Third Style painting, and he criticized the paintings for representing monstrosities rather than real things, “for instance, reeds are put in the place of columns, fluted appendages with curly leaves and volutes, instead of pediments, candelabra supporting representations of shrines, and on top of their pediments numerous tender stalks and volutes growing up from the roots and having human figures senselessly seated upon them…” (Vitr.De arch.VII.5.3) The center of walls often feature very small vignettes, such as sacro-idyllic landscapes, which are bucolic scenes of the countryside featuring livestock, shepherds, temples, shrines and rolling hills. The Third Style was still architectural but rather than implementing plausible architectural elements that viewers would see in their everyday world (and that would function in an engineering sense), the Third Style incorporated fantastic and stylized columns and pediments that could only exist in the imagined space of a painted wall. Example of Third Style painting, panel with candelabrum, Villa Agrippa Postumus, Boscotrecase, last decade of the 1st century B.C.E. ![]()
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