![]() However, the fresco theory is based on a series of postulates-such as the feasibility of fresco on pontate, the presence of giornate, or the use of alkali-sensitive pigments-which appear to be unsupported by physical or experimental evidence and which would require further assessment in order to validate the theory. I suppose the bright side is that at least this wall is preserved, both in situ, and (I’m slightly ashamed to admit) in the virtual world of Pokémon Go:Įnter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.The theory of fresco as the standard painting technique in Roman wall paintings, formulated in the mid-1960s by Paolo Mora and Laura Mora and Paul Philippot, has enjoyed general acceptance among specialists to the present day. If this is the example, it is nothing less than travesty that more of the dipinti did not survive. The richness of colour and design suggests that walking down the street in Herculaneum two thousand years ago would have been an overwhelming experience of sight. This relatively straightforward dipinto ties three of the local communities together by attesting the work of a man from Capua in Herculaneum promoting an event in Nola.ĭespite the relative paucity of dipinti in the city of Herculaneum, the three texts (and accompanying images) on this one wall provides a glimpse into the kind of thing one might have expected to find on every plastered surface of the town, had it survived antiquity. This is a wonderful little text, primarily because it is useful for demonstrating the regional network of gladiatorial games that operated in Campania (this is a subject I presented on at the 2nd North American Congress of Greek & Latin Epigraphy which will be published at some point in the future). ![]() ![]() Unrelated to these two dipinti, in the lowest register of the wall is an advertisement for a gladiatorial game. Like the wine jugs, his painting is accompanied by a brief inscription: Above this, there is a painting of the god Sancus, a figure associated with trust and honesty, and may have been an attempt by the innkeeper to indicate to his patrons the wine was not overly watered down. This indicates that it wasn’t quantity so much as quality of wine that predicated cost. This is written above a painting of four wine jugs, each labelled with a different price ranging from two to four and a half asses per sextarius (a unit equal to just over half a litre). The most prominent, in the middle, is a painted advertisement listing the cost of various types of wine, and is the origin of the name of the bar. Two of these seem related, whilst the lowest on the pilaster is not. Three of them are located on a single wall at Insula VI 14, at the entrance to the Bottega ad Cucumas. There are four dipinti that I am aware of in the scavi of Herculaneum today. ![]() In Herculaneum, in contrast, there is a distinct lack of plastered exteriors. In Pompeii, though these are now much damaged and faded, there are still large stretches of publicly accessible wall, such as that on the Via dell’Abbondanza, that preserve these texts. Unlike graffiti, which can be scratched into any hard surface, painting legible dipinti, most often used as a means of advertisement, required a flat smooth surface such as that provided by the painted plaster walls. This is not down to the smaller scale of the excavated city or a difference in the writing tendencies in the population, but rather seems to be simply a matter of surviving plaster surfaces. In my recent trip to the Vesuvian cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, one thing that struck me anew is the distinct lack of dipinti, that is, painted inscriptions, on the walls of Herculaneum in comparison to Pompeii. ![]()
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