New art from Pompeii: Stunning ancient frescoes unearthed
The ruins of Pompeii are still giving up new secrets, said Angela Giuffrida in The Guardian. Nearly 2,000 years after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the ancient Roman city in rock and ash, archaeologists have unearthed a series of remarkably preserved frescoes painted sometime between 15 B.C. and A.D. 50. Found amid the ruins of what appears to be a large villa, the frescoes adorn a banquet hall whose four walls were painted black in an apparent effort to mask the soot from boiling oil lamps. Also painted on those walls are remarkably well-preserved scenes from ancient Greek legends, including Helen of Troy meeting Paris and Apollo attempting to woo the priestess Cassandra.
The so-called black room and its frescoes “offer a glimpse of how some of the wealthier denizens lived, or at least the art they could meditate on as they munched,” said Elisabetta Povoledo in The New York Times. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the archaeological park of Pompeii, says the paintings were intended to spark conversation among banquet guests about love, fate, and more. And because they gathered after sunset, “the flickering light of the lamps had the effect of making the images appear to move,” he says, “especially after a few glasses of good Campanian wine.” The black room was discovered as part of a larger excavation focused on a block of urban buildings that appears to have been under reconstruction when the volcano blew. One fresco discovered in a nearby chamber last summer indicates that locals ate something that looks remarkably like pizza. Another room, thought to be linked to a bakery, offers evidence that enslaved people and donkeys might have been locked up together. For now, the black room is closed to tourists as archaeologists continue to excavate nearby. “We don’t know what’s there,” says Zuchtriegel. “That’s the great part.”