Corner Of A Painted Bedroom In A Villa At Boscoreale, near Pompeii (mid first century B.C.), a classic example of the Second Style
of wall-decoration, in which the painter used architectural forms to open up illusions of space beyond the wall. Passages in
Vitruvius suggest that painted stage-sets were a source of inspiration.
Finally painting. While the Greek tradition of panel pictures continued in both East and West (Caesar paid huge sums for two
mythological paintings by Timomachus of Byzantium), a significant new development was the appearance of illusionistic murals in
Italy. Inspired partly by Hellenistic stage-painting and partly by actual architecture, both past and present, wall-painters soon after
100 B.C. broke away from the stucco work of the so-called First Style (the Italian version of the Hellenistic fashion of masonry-style
wall-decoration) to evolve a purely pictorial style which dissolved the wall into an illusion of three-dimensional space. Invariably
this space was defined by an environment of simulated architecture. In the finest decorations the Italian villa-owner gave his rooms
an exotic, quasi-palatial splendour, with schemes of marble columns tricked out with gilded ornament, glimpses of colonnaded
courts receding in both linear and aerial perspective, and grand historical or religious figure-compositions set out on a podium or -
within a portico. Later, in the 40s and 30s, the architecture tended to become a framework for a central picture, conceived like a
window opening upon another world, and occupied by sacred landscapes or mythological figure-scenes.
The pictorial emphasis which in the Hellenistic world had been largely confined to the floor now returned to the wall, leaving
pavements decorated simply with abstract patterns in various mosaic or mosaic-related techniques. The importance of these
developments has often been underestimated, because much of our evidence comes from the bourgeois houses of small towns such
as Pompeii; but remains of frescoes from imperial residences in Rome and elsewhere during the Augustan period, combined with
information in the literary sources, especially Pliny, confirm that there was a clear shift in prestige from panels to murals in the late
Republic and early Empire. The imitation architecture of this Second Style therefore marks the beginning of a new chapter in ancient
painting, a chapter which was to see such masterpieces as the garden paintings from Livia's villa at Primaporta and the magical
landscapes of the Villa of Agrippa Postumus at Boscotrecase (below, pp. 778 f).
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