House Garden 
Fig. IX-A FARMHOUSE SCENE 
From a Painting in the “ House of the Second Fountain," Pom frit 
compared to modern pictures on plates and 
dishes, occasionally representing an actual 
building with some fidelity, but more often 
fantastic and unreal. Especially is this true 
when the representation is part of a mere 
decoration, rather than ot a picture making 
pretensions to realism. The frequent recur¬ 
rence, however, of like structures in widely 
diverse paintings argues an actual and com¬ 
mon prototype, and pictures ot structures 
resembling those one sees to-day in Italy 
are supposedly based on actualities. We 
may have grave doubts whether the palace 
in Fig. V ever existed outside of the 
painter’s imagination, for it will hardly bear 
structural analysis. But when we find that 
Seneca moralizes upon the unnatural custom 
of planting gardens upon the housetops, the 
upper part of the structure takes on an air 
of reasonableness. Whether Fig. VI is a 
temple or a villa is not quite clear; perhaps 
the painter did not himself know and was 
simply painting “architecture.” The tower¬ 
like buildings in Fig. VII are equally hard to 
explain with precision. But in Fig. VIII is 
another very similar edifice with a thatched 
barn behind it; and Fig. IX from a painting 
in the FI ouse of the Second Fountain at Pom¬ 
peii, obviously a farm scene, shows a some¬ 
what similar tower, lean-to shed, and pedestal 
with statues ; so that we have probably here 
a somewhat fantastic series of pictures of 
actual types of towers or belvederes connected 
with the farm buildings and villas of the time. 
Fig. 1 is an unmistakably realistic represen¬ 
tation of a wooden trellised arbor 
in a garden, and in other pictures 
in Rome and. Pompeii we have 
many details of garden decoration 
like trellises, fountains, seats, and 
the like, which help to a recon¬ 
struction, in imagination, ot the 
villa gardens ot antiquity. 
The interior decoration ot 
ancient villas was no doubt much 
like that of the Pompeiian houses, 
of the Baths of Titus, the Golden 
H ouse of Nero, and the house 
excavated in Rome in 1879, a part 
of whose walls were removed to 
the Museo delle Terme, where 
they may be seen to-day in marve¬ 
lous preservation. The painting 
was on hard plaster, done either in tempera or 
—in finer work—by the encaustic process, 
using melted wax as the medium. Strong 
backgrounds of yellow, red and black were 
used, and a fantastic architecture, in a wild 
sort of conventional perspective, divided the 
walls into panels, some of which were 
adorned with landscapes, mythological 
scenes or genre pictures. The ceilings were 
probably panelled in wood, perhaps some- 
AT BOSCO REALE 
(After Mau ) 
9 
