THIRD STYLEThe Primaporta gardenscape is the polar oppo-
site of First Style designs, which reinforce, rather than deny, the
heavy presence of confining walls. But tastes changed rapidly in the
Roman world, as in society today. Not long after Livia had her villa
painted, Roman patrons began to favor mural designs that re-
asserted the primacy of the wall surface. In the Third Style of Pom-
peian painting, artists no longer attempted to replace the walls with
three-dimensional worlds of their own creation. Nor did they seek
to imitate the appearance of the marble walls of Hellenistic kings.
Instead they decorated walls with delicate linear fantasies sketched
on predominantly monochromatic(one-color) backgrounds.
VILLA AT BOSCOTRECASE One of the earliest examples
of the new style is a cubiculum (FIG. 10-21) in the Villa of Agrippa
Postumus at Boscotrecase. The villa was probably painted just before
10 BCE. Nowhere did the artist use illusionistic painting to penetrate
the wall. In place of the stately columns of the Second Style are in-
substantial and impossibly thin colonnettes supporting feather-
weight canopies barely reminiscent of pediments. In the center of
this delicate and elegant architectural frame is a tiny floating land-
scape painted directly on the jet black ground. It is hard to imagine a
sharper contrast with the panoramic gardenscape at Livia’s villa. On
other Third Style walls, landscapes and mythological scenes appear
in frames, like modern canvas paintings hung on walls. Never could
these framed panels be mistaken for windows opening onto a world
beyond the room.
FOURTH STYLEIn the Fourth Style,however, a taste for illu-
sionism returned once again. This style became popular in the 50s CE,
and it was the preferred manner of mural decoration at Pompeii
when the eruption of Vesuvius buried the town in volcanic ash in 79.
Some examples of the new style, such as room 78 (FIG. 10-22) in the
emperor Nero’s Golden House in Rome (see page 259), display a
kinship with the Third Style. All the walls are an austere creamy
white. In some areas the artist painted sea creatures, birds, and other
motifs directly on the monochromatic background, much like the
landscape in the Boscotrecase villa (FIG. 10-21). Landscapes appear
here too—as framed paintings in the center of each large white sub-
division of the wall. Views through the wall are also part of the de-
sign, but the Fourth Style architectural vistas are irrational fantasies.
The viewer looks out not on cityscapes or round temples set in peri-
styles but at fragments of buildings—columns supporting half-
pediments, double stories of columns supporting nothing at all—
painted on the same white ground as the rest of the wall. In the
Fourth Style, architecture became just another motif in the painter’s
ornamental repertoire.10-22Fourth Style wall paintings in room 78 of the Domus Aurea (Golden House) of Nero, Rome, Italy, 64–68 ce.
The creamy white walls of this room in Nero’s Golden House display a kinship with the Third Style, but views through the wall revealing irrational
architectural vistas characterize the new Fourth Style.
Pompeii and the Cities of Vesuvius 251