We can see also some vegetal decoration, very, very delicate,
doesn't occupy space at all decorates the flat wall above.
So, very similar to what we saw again in Caldaria Mate.
Here's a detail of the Red Room,
where we can see the sacro-idyllic landscape better.
You can see that it follows in the line of other sacro-idyllic
landscapes that we've seen.
It has a shrine, in this case a column,
that supports an urn at the top with a tree.
Behind that, some sort of wall with windows over here, and
in this case, a group of shepherds with their flocks and
other figures possibly involved in some kind of ritual.
Located in and around the shrine.
And you can also see here extremely well in detail,
the way in which they have outlined this panel with a black frame
to make it very clear that this is contained within a frame.
That beyond that, you can now see that this is a column, a very attenuated,
very delicate column or a columnette we might call it, with a capital at the top,
but it is meant here not to occupy any real space.
Not to project into the viewer's face.
But to serve as a second frame for
the panel picture that is placed on the flat wall.
I think it's instructive to compare this to what we saw in the room with the masks,
House of Augustus, mature second style.
So mature second style commissioned by an imperial patron, mature,
third style, commissioned by, we think, an imperial patron.
Both sacro-idylic landscapes with white backgrounds, but
you can see the main difference here, not only the substantial architecture, but
the fact that the white background continues behind the architecture, right?
It continues behind the architecture here, here, here.
Which gives us the sense, again, that this is something that's a misty
landscape of some sort that one could, at least with one's eye, but
also perhaps one's self, could actually enter into and wander around.
That's the sense you get here.
But here you are stopped from doing that.
There's nothing more here than a panel picture that hangs on a wall.
Now you might say to me that if we're going back to respecting the wall and
to having a painting, it is fairly flat and
we are going back to the first stop of Roman wall painting.
And I remind you of one of the first Roman wall paintings that we looked at together.
But it really is very different from the first style as well,
because in the first style you'll remember the wall was not actually flat.
The wall was built up as a relief In a series of architectural zones,
and then the individual blocks were painted different colors
to give an illusion once again that this was not a plain wall.
But rather a very exotic and
expensive marble wall with marbles brought from all over the world to decorate it.
So an illusion of something that it wasn't.
Here in the third style we are again not dealing with any illusions really at all.
But just a respect for the flatness of the wall,
decorating that flat wall with a kind of wallpaper through paint and
then putting on that flat wallpapered wall pictures.
Hanging pictures just as we hang pictures on flat walls today.