#boscotrecase

~Wall painting: Polyphemus and Galatea in a landscape, from the imperial villa at Boscotrecase.

Period: Early Imperial, Augustan

Date: last decade of the 1st century B.C.

Culture: Roman

A landscape fresco from Villa of Agrippa Postumus, Boscotrecase, 1st century CE. Currently at Archaeological museum of Naples,

Btw  very similar to frescoes of Marcus Agrippa’s villa at Palazzo Massimo. And that’s no wonder since they too date back to first century CE.

De Artibus Romanorum

THE FOUR STYLES OF POMPEIIAN WALL PAINTING

If the accepted datings and chronologies are correct, then the short history of mural painting in Campania is one of the most eccentric, dynamic and imaginative in western art. The parameters of the problem were articulated In 1882, with the publication of Die Geschichte der dekorativen Wandmalerei in Pompeji, by the archæologist and librarian August Mau. In this lavishly-illustrated survey of the many Roman frescoes preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, Mau identified four distinct styles in use during the late Republic and early Empire. It is important to note that In Mau’s view, the four styles were developed sequentially, but were practiced simultaneously.

The story of Roman wall painting is complicated by the fact that the pace of stylistic development increases geometrically. The First “Incrustation” Style developed slowly and was the only one in use in the second and early first centuries B.C. The Second “Architectural” style, introduced at the time of the Roman annexation of Pompeii in 80 B.C., dominates the remainder of the first century B.C. The Third “Ornate” Style has as shorter run, from about 20 B.C. to A.D. 40 and the Fourth “Intricate” Style, introduced around A.D. 60, has a brief heyday until in is cut short by the events of A.D. 79.

Not only were four distinct styles developed within a compressed time frame, instead of making a steady, logical progress, they reverse each other and differ from each other wildly:

The First Style, exemplified by the fauces of the House of Sallust in Herculaneum, and illustrated above by a plate from Mau’s book, is a 3D recreation in stucco and paint of a type of multi-colored stone wall treatment used in Ptolemaic and Hellenistic palace architecture. This style primarily appealled to prosperous Samnite patrons whose taste exceeded their budget, although elements were retained in the subsequent styles favored by the wealthiest of patrons; The Second Style rejects the literal-minded mimesis of the First, using perspectival, illusionistic, and naturalistic effects to create not a fictive wall, but a fictive view through the actual wall into an implied space. The creators of magisterial Second-Style frescoes the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale and the Villa A at Oplontis use every means available to them to dissolve the walls of the room and offer the viewer a fantasy experience of expansive, unbounded vision (a perfect visual metaphor of the ideology of the early Empire); The Third Style, which began as the court style of Augustus and Agrippa, rejects and, at times, seems to ridicule, the intellectual deceptions of its precursor by underscoring the opacity and flatness of the wall, without ever lapsing into the ersatz reality of the First Syle. The Second Style's fictive window opening on to hazy, late afternoon vistas of fruit trees and shrines in garden courtyards is slammed shut by the the Third Style’s unbroken walls soaked in impenetrable, monochrome pigments. The provocations do not end there—the firmly-grounded, monumental, fictive architecture of the Second Style is displaced by frankly decorative, precious images of perversely miniaturized, delicate structures that exist outside of an definable spatial setting. The etiolated framing devices consist of architectural elements deformed and used in irrational situations. As oddly unappealing as this may sound, as the stunning frescoes of Cubicula 15 and 16 of the imperial Villa of Agrippa Postumus at Boscotrecase and Caldarium 8 at Oplontis Villa A show, the overall effect of the Third Style is one of severe elegance and tasteful restraint, the Roman equivalent of the Less-is-More aesthetic; The Fourth Style is a kind of lunatic synthesis of the dialectical oscillations that proceed it. A profusion of clearly quoted elements of Styles 1-3 are recombined to create complex, quasi-architectural, semi-realistic systems of imagery. The sensory overload and ostentatious display of pictorial wealth seen in extravaganzas like the Ixion Room in the House of the Vettii dismayed purist theoreticians like Vitruvius, but clearly delighted everyone else from Nero’s mistress Poppaea to Cicero to wealthy parvenus like the Vettius brothers. The Fourth Style is a microcosm of Mau’s theory: it was the last style in a succession of four, and yet within it, those four styles are practiced at the same time.