Like all art forms, Roman painting evolved and developed over time. Modern archaeologists and art historians divide the development of ancient Roman painting into four periods. The first two styles reflect what would have been familiar to Polybius, Caesar, and the other characters in the Nomenclator series of novels as those two types of painting were common before and during their time, but it is useful to know a little something of all four painting styles. It is also important to note that due to the impermanence of paint on cloth, wood, and similar materials, there are almost no examples, with the exception of funerary paintings on wood from Roman Egypt, of Roman paintings surviving on anything but plaster walls or as frescoes. How smaller paintings may have differed in style will never be known.
The first style is loosely dated to fall between 200 BC and 60 BC. This style is characterized by the attempt by the artist to duplicate the appearance of marble and masonry on plaster walls. Like so much of Roman culture, the painting style was strongly influenced by Roman contact with Greece. Later in this first period, architectural details such as cornices and dentils were added to the painted wall panels. Around this time, artists began to paint mythological scenes including landscapes, gods, goddesses, and mortal heroes on the walls. It is unlikely that the skill to create these scenes occurred without some development, so smaller scale paintings that did not survive the ages most likely predated this shift. Because of the massive eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, in 79 AD, a good number of wall paintings and frescoes were well preserved in the area around the Bay of Naples giving a solid understanding of the painting style of this period.
The second style emerged contemporary to the life of Caesar in the early first century BC. At this time, artists painted architectural forms and perspective on plaster walls using perspective and shading. While the perspective was not entirely accurate, as the style progressed an advancement in the skill of the artists is clearly visible. There is also a tendency to move away from mythological scenes and move toward painting of everyday life as well as architectural forms. There are examples of painted columns and pillars, walls that recede into the distance and shadows that trick the eye into perceiving more space than the room contains.
The third style developed under the Emperor Augustus later in the first century BC. During this period the artists moved toward creating more straight forward paintings of smaller landscapes of architecture, plants, animals, and sometimes people, bordered by painted frames on monochromatic walls. This was followed by the fourth style in the first century AD that returned to larger paintings of landscapes and naturalistic panoramic scenes.
Pliny the Younger, in the first century AD complained about the declinine in Roman portrait painting, but we will never know if he spoke the truth as virtually all the examples of ancient Roman portraiture come from the paintings on wood of the deceased persons face placed over the face of his or her mummy or as a painting on the coffin containing the mummy. While some of these portraits are of high quality, many are not. We will probably never find any more examples of ancient Roman portraiture. This only serves as an example of how much of the culture of ancient Rome has been lost to us.
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