Fountain-Building At Miletus (beginning of second century A.D.). The reconstruction reveals a number of features characteristic of Roman
'baroque' architecture: the elaborate play of advancing and receding entablatures, the sideways misplacement of pavilions so that those of the
upper storeys straddle the spaces between those below, and the enlivenment of the whole facade with statue-niches. Such features were especially
common in the eastern provinces.
In fresco painting all the indications point to a decline after the end of the first century. There are some exceptions, but the monotonous frescoes
from Ostia show that in general Hadrianic and Antonine interior decorators were content with repeating hackneyed decorative schemes which echo
the Third and Fourth Styles of the previous century with increasing simplification and hardly a hint of originality-broad splashes of colour,
especially red and yellow and white, but fewer and fewer mythological panels, which were gradually replaced completely by individual figures or
motifs floating free in the centre of each zone. Ceiling decoration, by contrast, reached new heights of inspiration during the Antonine period: the
strikingly detailed stuccoes from the Tombs of the 'Valerii', the Pancratii, and the Nasonii at Rome, all c. 160, represent the very apogee of the
Roman stucco-worker's craft. But it too seems to have declined thereafter, and by the early third century we have instances of walls and ceiling in
the same room being painted with identical, humdrum, compartmentalized schemes, as in some of the early catacombs. Only in the occasional 'all-
over' figured composition does second-century wall painting show signs of a different approach, as in a lively Hadrianic fishing scene from near the
Porto Flumentano in Rome, but this appears to have become widespread only from early in the third century.