Forgotten Fragments of Ancient Wall Paintings in Rome I.–The Palatine

Students of ancient painting are apt to bestow exclusive attention upon the long series of pictures in the Museum of Naples recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and to forget the many and excellent specimens of the art still extant in Rome. Yet these often surpass in quality anything found in the buried Campanian cities, since it is only natural that painters of ability and talent should have sought for work in the capital rather than in Pompeii and other holiday resorts. The neglect of the paintings discovered in Rome is of comparatively recent date. In the seventeenth century Pietro Santi Bartoli (1635–1700) had inaugurated a systematic series of publications of the figured monuments of Rome, including paintings engraved after his own drawings. A host of draughtsmen and engravers followed in his steps, and down to the middle of the nineteenth century appeared volume after volume of illustrations of Roman paintings, admirably calculated to please the cultivated traveller and amateur, but as a rule totally wanting in accuracy.