Section of wall painting with landscape,

1st century CE

In this fragment of a wall painting, polychrome moldings and a gilded colonnette frame a central panel that features a small island in the foreground. A man, possibly a fisherman, crosses a bridge to a walled sanctuary. Beyond are a turret and a sacred grove, and, in the distance, other buildings and trees are visible in the haze. While we do not know the origin of this painting, most of the surviving examples of Roman wall painting have been found in Campania, around the Bay of Naples, particularly in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were buried when the volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted, leaving many buildings and their painted decoration intact. The archaeological record there attests to the prevalence of wall paintings in elite homes and to changing painting styles over time. These so-called sacro-idyllic landscapes, which feature imagery related to the worship of Roman gods, were particularly common on Pompeian walls from 20 BCE to 79 CE.