Sacred landscape.
2nd c BCE-1st c CE Roman Roman Republican Painting

ROMAN REPUBLICAN Anonymous (c. 510 BCE - 27 BCE) Primary
2 c BCE-79 CE
2nd c BCE-1st c CE
Fresco
Painting
Roman Republican
Shrine
Pompeii. Campania. Italy.
Naples. Museo Archeologico Nazionale.
Athens65.rom00008
Many of the houses in Pompeii had painted walls, which gives us an excellent opportunity to study Roman painting in some detail. Country shrines like this one were a popular part of the bucolic landscapes on the walls of Pompeii. Roman painters, or perhaps Greek painters working for Roman patrons, made a great contribution to art through their depiction of space. A painting like this Sacred Landscape allows us to speak of ROMAN ILLUSIONISM, for we are given a sense of real objects in real space. The artist created the sense of space by emphasizing the contrasts between modeled light and dark, both depicted with a quick, flickering brush stroke, flooding this deep vista with light and color.