Painting Of A Seaside Villa of the early-imperial age. Unlike the town-houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which turned away from the surrounding
streets to focus upon internal gardens and light-wells, the luxury coastal and lakeside villas of the nobility faced outwards over the water. Behind
them were wooded parks containing shrines and gazebos.
Interior Decoration
Interior decoration was an essential ingredient of the Roman life-style and can hardly be considered apart from domestic architecture. Its strictly art-
historical aspects are dealt with elsewhere (Chapter 32); here we must examine its function and its meaning to the householder.
At the most mundane level a fine mosaic pavement or a set of painted murals were designed to beautify a room. The finest decorations were generally
reserved for the main dining- and reception-rooms, but other areas of the house which were likely to be seen by visitors-the atrium, the peristyle, the
baths, certain bedrooms-could also receive special treatment. Only in the more prosperous houses, however, was the majority of rooms elaborately
decorated. Even in Pompeii the painted walls which conform to the four well-known styles were outnumbered by those with simple striped and
panelled schemes and by walls with plain plaster, and the mosaic pavements were concentrated in a few particularly opulent dwellings, while the
majority of floors were of mortar with perhaps at the most a sprinkling of inset tesserae or marble fragments. In less prosperous cities or societies, for
instance in certain parts of Roman Britain, the house- or villa-owner concentrated most of his resources upon adorning one room: the central dining-
room of the Lullingstone villa, with its Bellerophon and Europa mosaics, is a case in point (above, p. 634).
At a more ambitious level the proprietor used decorations to transform and enhance his environment. This is particularly true of the Pompeian styles of
wall-painting, in which the imitation veneering of the First Style echoed the real veneers of Hellenistic palaces. The porphyry columns and exotic
architecture of the Second Style (above, pp. 522, 546) also evoked the grandeur of a court, though probably transmitted through the medium of stage-
painting, and the baroque extravagances of the Fourth Style (below, p. 784) may have owed something to the theatre but were probably more a form of
escapism into a world of pure imagination. The perspectival forms of both styles also, of course, seemed to enlarge the physical space within a room;
and in some instances, by offering a glimpse of sky above the painted architecture, or by opening a window through it on to a mythical -world, the
decoration seemed to break right through the bounds of the wall. The ultimate expression of this is provided by those paintings, such as the garden
murals from Primaporta, which turned the room into an open-sided pavilion set in a magic forest.
The aesthetic value of such paintings in rooms which were often cramped and badly lit is easily appreciated. Another role of interior decoration was to
turn parts of the house into picture-galleries (pinacothecae). In Hellenistic times, copies of well-known paintings were carried out in mosaic to
embellish the central fields of pavements, and the same tradition continued in certain cities of the east, such as Syrian Antioch, through the imperial
age. But in the Roman west these copies were incorporated as painted panels within wall-decorations. Well-off Pompeians, such as the brothers Vettii
and the owner of the House of the Tragic Poet, collected reproductions of Greek old masters in much the same way as more recent generations have
collected copies of the Laughing Cavalier or the Mona Lisa. This was one means whereby the nouveaux riches could make a display of their culture.