Pompeii’s latest secret: pristine Helen of Troy fresco uncovered
In between broken walls and beneath a clear sky, Helen of Troy is catching her first rays of sun in 2000 years.
A gaggle of archaeologists and film-makers have just climbed up a slope of debris from Vesuvius to see her, for today she is part of the latest secret to be uncovered at Pompeii.
Helen and a number of other characters from the Trojan war have been found in exquisite frescoes that adorn a freshly unearthed wall in a dining room.
They are beautiful but what makes them so unusual is their extraordinary condition. It seems that the room had been decorated shortly before Vesuvius erupted.
The discovery of the dining room was made towards the end of filming for the documentary Pompeii: The New Dig, which charts this largest excavation in a generation.
On the day of the find, the site of the dining room comprised ruined walls and a pile of what looked like discarded clumps of asphalt.
This was, in fact, lapilli, the small pumice stones that rained down from Vesuvius in AD79. It is an effort to climb the modest slope made by the lapilli (at five metres high) as the stones give way easily underfoot, but that means this is virgin territory – no-one has touched this spot in almost two millennia.
At the top of the slope was Dr Gennaro Iovino, a local man who has excavated here for decades, and in front of him lay three fresh frescoes.
The laypeople assembled thought they were stunning, but the experienced eye of Iovino declared them to be extraordinary, even for Pompeii.
“These paintings are different from the ones we have seen in the house on the other side of this wall,” Iovino explained.
“These are really important. These are not normal things to be found in Pompeii.”
The frescoes, it transpires, are not in the traditional style and it seems that the painters were “doing something new”.
The pictures depict characters from Greek myths, including Leda and the Swan, of which Zeus took the form in order to seduce Leda, painted alongside their daughter Helen meeting Paris, who is captioned with his alternative name of Alexander. Apollo is also shown with the cursed prophetess Cassandra who sits upon the omphalos, the “navel of the world”. All of them are in great condition and have the experts intrigued.
“They are very high quality,” said Dr Sophie Hay, a British archaeologist who has spent much of her career working in Pompeii.
“The dining room seems to be vaguely unique in the sense that normally there are figurative panels with a border around them, but the ones in that room are painted directly on to the background. So it’s like they’re doing something new ... but obviously they never got to enjoy it.”
The room has now been fully excavated, but even when there was 5m of pumice in there Iovino could identify it as a “winter dining room”. He recognised that it ran from east to west with a large opening at the western end, meaning it was designed to catch as much sun as possible in the winter evenings.
He also noticed the black paint, which would mask soot from the oil lamps that burnt during the dark nights and, against this background, the frescoes would pop off the walls when the sun hit them.
As the excavation continued, a white mosaic floor with a black border, which would have helped to reflect the last of the day’s sun, was discovered.
It is yet another landmark find for Iovino and his team on the dig at insula 10, Section IX of Pompeii, an excavation that has produced many discoveries.
“Fifty years ago, [this type of excavation] would have been impossible for technical reasons,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
“We should imagine that maybe in 50 or 100 or 200 years people will have much more sophisticated methods.”