gems, Roman art, color, Roman wall painting, color science

The Roman villa rustica at Boscotrecase originally belonged to Augustus’s friend and aide M. Vipsanius Agrippa and his wife, Julia, the princeps’ daughter.¹ The surviving decoration can be dated to about 01 B.C.² When the fifteen panels from the villa were reinstalled at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987 and Peter von Blanckenhagen’s fundamental study of all of the preserved wall paintings in New York and Naples, originally published in 1962, was reissued with color illustrations, a fresh evaluation of the panels became possible. Here we shall be concerned with exploring the ways and degrees in which several specific objects and features that are integrated into the highly complex decorative system reflect reality. In each of the three preserved rooms it is now possible to understand more completely a specific ingredient of the decoration. In the process of elucidating each of these elements, one enters into the larger orbit of Roman history, culture, and language. The third part of this study is, in fact, primarily philological and takes one beyond the usual realms of art-historical investigation. The ramifications of our consideration of the word vitrum—glass—yield insights into the geographical and cultural expansion of the world that occurred under Augustus. The result is a better understanding of what these paintings may have conveyed to their patrons and to contemporary viewers.³