Reassessing Artworks of Ancient Rome
ROME — Painting was more prized than sculpture by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and easel paintings more than frescoes, which were considered essentially decorative. Yet not a single easel painting of the kind described by Pliny the Elder in his encyclopedic “Natural History” of the first century A.D. has come down to us. Accordingly, when it comes to understanding Roman painting, we are seemingly doomed to be equipped with only half the story.
An international group of experts led by Eugenio La Rocca has now confronted this obstacle in the exhibition “Rome: The Painting of an Empire” by bringing together over 100 of the finest and most characteristic surviving examples of Roman painting, the majority of them frescoes, but suggesting a broader picture of painting in the ancient world despite the losses. Spanning more than four centuries, these works illustrate the principal genres, from mythological, religious and landscape painting to still life, the nude and portraiture, offering a panoramic view of unusual scope for a single exhibition.
While we do not have actual examples of ancient easel paintings, they appear in a number of frescoes. In the first room of the show, a mural from the House of the Criptoportico in Pompeii contains two of them — a religious scene and a still life of a basket of fruit and a live cockerel — with trompe l'oeil wooden doors folded back to reveal the images. Also here are some classic examples of mythological scenes — episodes from Homer’s “Odyssey” — from Rome and Pompeii, which display skillful handling of landscape and figure painting. Notably the artists have included shadows of figures and trees, a feature more common than often thought.
Julius Caesar is credited with starting the fashion for fine art exhibitions in public places and by the first century A.D. there were hundreds of works by famous Greek artists in the capital. Pliny the Elder certainly had the opportunity to study the paintings of more than 30 Greek artists he mentions in his “Natural History.” Although fresco painting may have been considered more of a craft than an art, many of the practitioners were Greek and the most sophisticated of them undoubtedly drew inspiration from now lost easel paintings...
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An international group of experts led by Eugenio La Rocca has now confronted this obstacle in the exhibition “Rome: The Painting of an Empire” by bringing together over 100 of the finest and most characteristic surviving examples of Roman painting, the majority of them frescoes, but suggesting a broader picture of painting in the ancient world despite the losses. Spanning more than four centuries, these works illustrate the principal genres, from mythological, religious and landscape painting to still life, the nude and portraiture, offering a panoramic view of unusual scope for a single exhibition.
While we do not have actual examples of ancient easel paintings, they appear in a number of frescoes. In the first room of the show, a mural from the House of the Criptoportico in Pompeii contains two of them — a religious scene and a still life of a basket of fruit and a live cockerel — with trompe l'oeil wooden doors folded back to reveal the images. Also here are some classic examples of mythological scenes — episodes from Homer’s “Odyssey” — from Rome and Pompeii, which display skillful handling of landscape and figure painting. Notably the artists have included shadows of figures and trees, a feature more common than often thought.
Julius Caesar is credited with starting the fashion for fine art exhibitions in public places and by the first century A.D. there were hundreds of works by famous Greek artists in the capital. Pliny the Elder certainly had the opportunity to study the paintings of more than 30 Greek artists he mentions in his “Natural History.” Although fresco painting may have been considered more of a craft than an art, many of the practitioners were Greek and the most sophisticated of them undoubtedly drew inspiration from now lost easel paintings...