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Roman Wall Painting

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

For many people interested in the ancient world, one of the most attractive aspects of Roman art is the wealth of wall paintings in houses of Pompeii and other towns as well as villas buried by Vesuvius. Since their discovery in the eighteenth century, these and later found paintings have formed highly esteemed objects, for which reason they play a major role in art history. The study of Roman wall painting uses to start from this material and bases its chronology, which covers an era beginning in the second century BCE and ending with Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 CE, on an articulation established by the German scholar August Mau in the 1870s during his in-depth explorations of Pompeii’s ongoing excavations (Mau 1882; cf. Eristov and Monier 2014). Mau divided the bulk of Pompeian material he knew – which has grown ever since on account of additional findings but at the same time often no longer available due to bad conservation and loss of much data – into four chronological phases,...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Eric M. Moormann

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  1. Eric M. Moormann
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Correspondence to Eric M. Moormann .

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  1. Dept. of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, Binghamton University - SUNY, Binghamton, NY, USA

    Jeffrey A. Becker

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Moormann, E.M. (2018). Roman Wall Painting. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3405-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3405-1

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