paintings of Alexander's battles (by Philoxenus of Eretria and a Graeco-Egyptian paintress Helen) and get hints of others. If, as
seems likely, one of them was reproduced three centuries later in the famous mosaic pavement from the House of the Faun at
Pompeii (photo facing p. 438), the artists of this time were capable of highly complex compositions with a full mastery of
foreshortening and of modelling by means of deep shadows and strong highlights: see especially the horse shown in back view in the
foreground. They also conveyed a degree of emotion in the faces of the figures: Alexander's grim determination is contrasted with
the alarmed expressions of Darius and the other Persians. In colour, though obviously the mosaicist was to some extent restricted by
his materials, the copy seems to reflect a deliberate limitation of the painter's palette to red, yellow, black, white, and tones available
from combinations of these, an aesthetic device whose popularity in the works of Apelles and his contemporaries is recorded by
Pliny. Blue is absent and green confined to inconspicuous details.
The action of the Alexander mosaic takes place on a shallow stage between a brown foreground and a white sky, the effect of space
being achieved principally by spears on the skyline. The only true landscape element, forming a counterbalance to the prominent
figure of Darius in his chariot, is a dead tree. It has often been claimed that landscape was used sparingly in Hellenistic painting and
always in a subsidiary role to human figures, much as it appears in the Telephus frieze. But a painted frieze above the entrance of a
recently excavated tomb at Vergina dated as early as the fourth century shows a hunt scene in which landscape plays a larger role;
the mounted huntsmen move in and out among trees as in a real environment. How far landscape settings had developed by late
Hellenistic times is shown by the Odyssey paintings from a first-century house on the Esquiline hill in Rome, almost certainly
adapted from a Greek frieze of the previous century. Here the story of Odysseus' adventures was told with small figures set within a
vast unfolding scenario of trees, cliffs and water. Even so there is no evidence that landscape as a subject in its own right, that is,
with the figured element reduced to staffage, was developed before the Roman period.
Among the other funerary paintings some interest attaches to the figures on the facade of the Great Tomb at Levkadia, representing a
soldier, Hermes the guide of souls, and two judges of the dead, and to the interior scheme of the tomb chamber of Lyson and
Callicles, also at Levkadia, which already in the second century offers a foretaste of the trompe l'oeil architecture to come in mural
painting, albeit in a very simple form (shaded pilasters linked by hanging festoons). The painted gravestones are of limited interest,
for they show mostly simple one- or two-figure commemorative subjects, like their Classical predecessors; only the stele of Hediste
from Demetrias (third century) gives an indication of the kind of elaborate architectural interiors which may have occurred as
backdrops in more monumental art. Otherwise our knowledge of Hellenistic painting is confined to little more than literary
references (mainly lists of artists' names) and tantalizing echoes. We know from Pliny that the period saw the emergence of new
genres, such as caricature, everyday life, and still life, but there are no surviving examples before Roman times. The mythological
scenes in Pompeian wall-decoration may in many instances go back to 'old masters' of the Hellenistic period; but it is rarely possible
to determine the date and location of the prototypes or the degree to which the Roman painter adapted them to contemporary taste
and to the decorative context.