FIRST STYLEThe First Style is also called the Masonry Style
because the decorator’s aim was to imitate costly marble panels us-
ing painted stucco relief. The fauces (FIG. 10-17) of the Samnite
House at Herculaneum greets the visitor with a stunning illusion of
walls constructed, or at least faced, with marbles imported from
quarries all over the Mediterranean. This approach to wall decora-
tion is comparable to the modern practice, employed in private
libraries and corporate meeting rooms alike, of using cheaper man-
ufactured materials to approximate the look and shape of genuine
wood paneling. The practice is not, however, uniquely Pompeian or
Roman. First Style walls are well documented in the Greek world
from the late fourth century BCEon. The use of the First Style in
Republican houses is yet another example of the Hellenization of
Roman architecture.
SECOND STYLE The First Style never went completely out of
fashion, but after 80 BCEa new approach to mural design became
more popular. The Second Style is in most respects the antithesis of
the First Style. Some scholars have argued that the Second Style also
has precedents in Greece, but most believe it is a Roman invention.
Certainly, the Second Style evolved in Italy and was popular until
around 15 BCE, when Roman painters introduced the Third Style.
Second Style painters did not aim to create the illusion of an elegant
marble wall, as First Style painters sought to do. Rather, they wanted
to dissolve a room’s confining walls and replace them with the illu-
sion of an imaginary three-dimensional world.
VILLA OF THE MYSTERIESAn early example of the new
style is the room (FIG. 10-18) that gives its name to the Villa of the
Mysteries at Pompeii. Many scholars believe this chamber was used
to celebrate, in private, the rites of the Greek god Dionysos (Roman
Bacchus). Dionysos was the focus of an unofficial mystery religion
popular among women in Italy at this time. The precise nature of
the Dionysiac rites is unknown, but the figural cycle in the Villa of
the Mysteries, illustrating mortals (all female save for one boy) inter-
acting with mythological figures, probably provides some evidence
for the cult’s initiation rites. In these rites young women, emulating
Ariadne, daughter of King Minos (see Chapter 4), united in mar-
riage with Dionysos.
The backdrop for the nearly life-size figures is a series of painted
panels imitating marble revetment, just as in the First Style but with-
out the modeling in relief. In front of this marble wall (but actually
on the same two-dimensional surface), the painter created the illu-
sion of a shallow ledge on which the human and divine actors move
around the room. Especially striking is the way some of the figures
interact across the corners of the room. For example, a seminude
winged woman at the far right of the rear wall lashes out with her
whip across the space of the room at a kneeling woman with a bare
back (the initiate and bride-to-be of Dionysos) on the left end of the
right wall. Nothing comparable to this room existed in Hellenistic
Greece. Despite the presence of Dionysos, satyrs, and other figures
from Greek mythology, this is a Roman design.
VILLA AT BOSCOREALEIn the early Second Style Dionysiac
mystery frieze, the spatial illusionism is confined to the painted plat-
form that projects into the room. But in mature Second Style de-
signs, Roman painters created a three-dimensional setting that also
extends beyond the wall. An example is a cubiculum (FIG. 10-19)
from the Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, near Pom-
peii, decorated between 50 and 40 BCE. The excavators removed the
frescoes soon after their discovery, and today they are part of a re-
constructed Roman bedroom in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
All around the room the Second Style painter opened up the walls
with vistas of Italian towns, marble temples, and colonnaded court-
yards. Painted doors and gates invite the viewer to walk through the
wall into the magnificent world the painter created.
Although the Boscoreale painter was inconsistent in applying it,
this Roman artist, like many others around the Bay of Naples,
demonstrated a knowledge of single-point linear perspective,often
incorrectly said to be an innovation of Italian Renaissance artists
(see “Renaissance Perspectival Systems,” Chapter 21, page 547). In
this kind of perspective, all the receding lines in a composition con-
verge on a single point along the painting’s central axis to show
depth and distance. Ancient writers noted that Greek painters of the
fifth century BCEfirst used linear perspective for the design of Athen-
ian stage sets (hence its Greek name,skenographia,“scene paint-
ing”). In the Boscoreale cubiculum, the painter most successfully
employed the device in the far corners, where a low gate leads to a248 Chapter 10 THE ROMAN EMPIRE10-17First Style wall painting in the fauces of the Samnite House,
Herculaneum, Italy, late second century bce.
In First Style murals, the decorator’s aim was to imitate costly marble
panels using painted stucco relief. The style is Greek in origin and
another example of the Hellenization of Republican architecture.