ROMAN FRESCO FRAGMENT
C. 1ST CENTURY A.D.
Estimate: £2,000 - £3,000
Auction: 13 March 2025 from 13:00 GMT
Description
pigment painted on plaster, the fragment depicting the edge of a cream coloured border frame featuring tendrils in umber, a red ground below, accompanied by a 19th / early 20th century label reading “Fresco wall painting. BC 200. From forum in Rome, discovered 1879…”
Dimensions
18.2cm diameter
Provenance
Contents of Parrox Hall, Lancashire, United Kingdom since at least the 1960s, thence by descent
Footnote
Outside of sculpture, fresco painting is the best known of all the Roman visual arts. The vast majority of surviving examples originate from the region around Mount Vesuvius, as they were preserved following the eruption of the volcano in 79 A.D. Pliny the Elder, whose life was taken in the aftermath, was a contemporary of this style of painting, and wrote the following:
‘‘Ludius … was the first to introduce the fashion of covering the walls of our houses with most pleasing landscapes, representing villas, porticos, ornamental gardening, woods, groves, hills, fishponds, canals, rivers, sea-shores, and anything else one could desire.’’