The decoration which the painter Theophilos was commissioned to execute in the house of Diotimos in the mid-third century bc (above, p.1014) was apparently in the Alexandrian ‘‘zone style,’’ a local variant of the Masonry Style current throughout the Hellenistic world. This imitated structures in ashlar blockwork, painted to resemble colored stone. Above a low plinth, the Masonry Style divided the wall into two major zones, the lower consisting of large panels (orthostates), the upper representing courses of isodomic blockwork (stones of uniform size laid in the manner of stretcher-bond brickwork); one or two narrow string courses or friezes separated these zones, and the top of the wall was finished with a frieze or cornice (Ling 1991: 12-14, with diagrams). The appearance of stone was evoked in both paint and stucco moulding - the margins of the blocks were recessed so as to resemble drafted masonry. The ‘‘zone style,’’ however, achieved its architectural effects without relief modeling in plaster, using painted or incised lines to delineate blocks (Venit 2002: 28, 53-4). In the Philadelphia house, Theophilos was to decorate the vestibule with a plinth or socle (hypostolion) imitating patterned stone (phleboperimetrion - ‘‘veined like alabaster’’? See below, p.1027), followed by a colored band, a wide ‘‘multicolored’’ zone, and finally a Lesbian kymation moulding in purple (P. Cairo Zenon III 59445). In the two Greek-style dining rooms, he was to execute only part of the decoration - an upper zone plus moulding in the seven-couch room, and just the moulding in the five-couch room. It is possible that the rest of the decoration in these two would have been entrusted to less skilled (and less expensive) hands (Nowicka 1984: 257), but equally likely that it was executed in real stone revetments, appropriate to the more splendid effect required in a dining-room.
Diotimos’ painted rooms in the Fayum probably echoed the kind of interiors that officials of his rank might have expected at home in Ptolemaic Alexandria; an idea of some of the typical features can be gleaned from the painted interiors of the city’s tombs, which likewise include fictive representations of zones of colored stonework, and mouldings marking the horizontal divisions in the scheme of the walls. They do not, however, simply replicate houses, as Margery Venit has observed in her comprehensive study of the tombs of Alexandria, but present a grander architectural ambience for the dead (Venit 2002: 36). Only scant fragments of painted decoration have been recovered in the city to demonstrate what actually existed, and these do not come from areas of ordinary occupation: small pieces of painted wall-plaster from the Chantier Finney site, within the area where the royal palaces were situated, seem to have been derived from true Masonry Style decor, with the blocks modeled in shallow relief (Adriani 1940: 52-3, pls. xix, xx). Small glazed tiles colored white, yellow, green, and blue from the same site probably belonged to tiled wall-covering, a technique represented in paint, as noted by Adriani (1940: 44-45), in tomb II in the Anfushy necropolis (Venit 2002: 80-85, pl. II). In the outer room, courses of chequer-board ‘‘tiling’’ separated by ‘‘alabaster’’ strips appear above a deep zone of ‘‘alabaster,’’ and the central course of ‘‘tiles’’ is interrupted periodically by square panels depicting Egyptian crowns; this scheme is apparently a late first-century bc replacement of an earlier masonry scheme. The ‘‘tiling’’ is repeated as the main decoration in the inner burial chamber, the decoration overall thus conferring a distinctly palatial appearance upon the tomb, which, together with the depiction of crowns, seems to reflect the gradual appropriation into the private funerary sphere of royal trappings.
The Hellenistic Masonry Style has been seen as the precursor of the First Pompeian Style, which presents a similar structural programme with modifications that transcend the architectural logic (Laidlaw 1985: 25-37). The possibly continuing use in the Greek East of such schemes is one question in the study of Roman provincial wallpainting which new discoveries in Egypt may help to elucidate, along with the degree to which decorative styles in the east may have remained independent of fashions in the western empire. A question posed in the reverse direction is the potential derivation of the Second Pompeian Style, with its illusionistic architectural views, from the east, and specifically from the ‘‘baroque’’ architecture of Alexandria. Detailed argument in support of its Alexandrian origin in both buildings and painted decoration has been offered anew by McKenzie (2007: 96-112), drawing attention to comparable effects of perspective, shadow, and spatial recession painted in the Ptolemaic tombs of Alexandria, and the architectural elements on the stone loculus slabs.
Until recently the evidence for non-funerary wall-paintings of Roman date in Alexandria was as fragmentary as that for the Ptolemaic Period: pieces of painted plaster from the Serapeum site show details typical of the Second and Third Pompeian Styles and have been attributed to a redecoration of the Ptolemaic sanctuary in the first century ad (McKenzie et al. 2004: 86 n.44, pls. viii-ix): they depict egg-and-dart moulding, a griffin atop a cornice, a fragment with an animal hoof which might indicate some figure composition, and a patterned band in the ‘‘oriental’’ style - the latter a significant feature in comparison with the motifs used in the Third Pompeian Style, along with Egyptianizing ritual scenes (De Vos 1980: 60-5, pls. xxxiv-xlvii). Of allegedly Alexandrian origin are a number of small fragments of painted plaster, now in a private collection and restored into four panels, with figure scenes including mythological characters (Odysseus and? Penelope), fishermen, and soldiers in action, on guard, and aboard ships (Hanfmann 1984). The subject matter is somewhat heterogeneous, the style of depiction fluent but cursory, reminiscent of illustrated manuscripts; a date in the late third - early fourth century ad has been suggested for them, and in some respects they seem comparable to the scenes from Homer, and other subjects, painted in a fourth-century house at Amheida in the Dakhla Oasis (Leahy 1980). A stylistic but much later parallel nearer to home is provided by the painted fragments found in a house at Abu Mina dated to the sixth century (Grossmann and Pfeiffer 2003).
By contrast with this meagre and enigmatic evidence, excavations at Kom el-Dikka have uncovered houses with well-preserved interior decoration spanning the Roman Period and exemplifying two recurrent features of surviving paintings elsewhere - the use of a decorative scheme which defined the main zone of the wall as a series of large panels, with a plain or decorated socle below, and a frieze or narrower paneled zone above; and the imitation of colored stone in various formats, from simple panels to the more intricate designs of tiling or geometric patterns formed in opus sectile. In sector M at Kom el-Dikka an early Roman house where the mosaic pavements are also preserved in several rooms retains an extensive amount of decoration on the wall of one room (no. 14: Majcherek 2002: 41-3). Here the main zone of the wall, above a low socle, is divided into large panels, 0.65 m square with linear definition in red and black, alternating with narrow rectangles; the latter are filled with garlands, and there are traces of figural motifs - a garlanded female head, and a dog - within the square panels, and a painted ‘‘string course’’ above. Comparable schemes where the main zone of the wall has been divided into panels of similar size have also been found in houses in sectors G and W1N, where the plain but rich coloring, including extensive use of dark red, suggests the imitation of stone (Tkaczow 1995): that actual stone decoration in the opus sectile technique was used on floors and walls at this site is indicated by extensive finds of fragmentary stone, including red and green porphyry, as well as the surviving pavement in the ‘‘Villa of the Birds,’’ noted above.
The scheme in room 14 has been compared to the Masonry Style as found elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean (Majcherek 2002: 42); similar paneled schemes were apparently in widespread use in Roman Egypt and may likewise be seen as ultimately derived from the proportions and divisions used in that style. They are also, however, comparable to a style of decoration found everywhere in the Roman Empire from the late first century onwards, where the main zone of the wall is divided into large framed fields carrying a central motif, alternating with narrow areas of vertical ornamentation with or without frames (R. Thomas 1995: 308-11), a style which itself may have derived its proportions and rhythm from the First Pompeian Style. The ‘‘panel style’’ has been found in a number of locations: at Kellis in the Dakhla Oasis it is used in a substantial private house (Hope and White-house 2006: 319-20, 323 col. pls. 1,2), as well as the mud-brick structure identified as the mammisi of the god Tutu in the settlement’s main temple (Kaper 1997: 205, pl. VII, b-c), where the combination of this contemporary decor with traditional religious imagery composed in horizontal registers is so far unique in Egypt in a nonfunerary context. A simpler version of this design, on a green ground, is also used throughout the temple precinct, notably on the temenos wall, where it is surmounted by a lower zone of oblong panels and an acanthus frieze (Hope 2002: 191 pl. 14, 192), and it similarly appears on the temenos wall of the temple at Deir el-Haggar, cleared by the SCA in 1997-8, where the large panels are painted alternately yellow and red, like those in the Kellis mammisi, and the design is topped by a vine frieze. A court in the rock shrine at Ain el-Labakha, in the Kharga Oasis, has a simple design of panels outlined with a red fillet and lightly modeled moulding, and painted to resemble breccia or marble (Hussein 2000: 14, photos 20-22).
Painted decoration discovered in the Greek settlements of the Fayum suggests that here, too, the ‘‘panel style’’ and imitation stonework were common: two of the houses of early Roman date east of the dromos at Medinet Madi have preserved areas of such decoration (Bresciani 1976: 25-8, pl. A center left and bottom left). Of particular note, although poorly represented in the published photographs, is one of the well-preserved mud-brick buildings with upper storeys uncovered at Batn Harit (Theadelphia) during Otto Rubensohn’s Fayum explorations (Rubensohn 1905: 5-15, with plan fig. 6 on p.7). In this three walls of the principal room, accessed from an open court via openings in the fourth wall, were decorated on a blue-green ground with panels defined by patterned borders and carrying central motifs, compared by Rubensohn to the soaring figures seen in Pompeian wall-paintings. This design was organized around three niches in each wall, the larger central one with flanking pilasters added in plaster, and all containing figure paintings: best preserved are Demeter and Kore in the central niche on the east wall (Rubensohn 1905: figs. 8 on p. 9 and 12, an artist’s copy, on p.13), and the young male nudes like genii in the smaller, flanking niches on the south wall, one beside an altar, the other holding a garlanded vexillum; remains of another paneled scheme with alternating yellow and black fields were found in an adjacent room, and there was another painted niche in a room beside the stairs. The decoration in the principal room, for which Rubensohn suggested a second-century ad date, overlay an earlier scheme of the simplest architectonic kind, following the outline of the bricks. A similar combination of a niche containing figure painting with paneled decor including imitation stone was found in a house at Philadelphia (Block D6; Viereck 1928: 15, pl. IVc). Ongoing excavation of the substantial house at Kellis (see above) is revealing a profusion of decorative styles (6 different schemes in 5 rooms, including elaborate fictive opus sectile, and a kind of reduced version of the Second Style: Hope and Whitehouse 2006: 319-22) suggesting that the ‘‘panel style’’ was one choice amongst many possibilities - but one that was perhaps deemed appropriate to certain formal settings.
Devotional figure paintings as part of the basic wall decoration, not integrated within a decorative scheme, are familiar from the several examples found in situ at Karanis (Boak and Peterson 1931: pls. xxiv figs. 47-8, xxv fig. 49, xxxvi fig. 71). These are vivid, but not accomplished, paintings, comparable in style to the wall-paintings at Kom Madi (above, pp.1013-14) and the many similar images painted on wooden panels (see below). Examples of much more accomplished work have recently been discovered in a well-to-do house, H 10, at Marina el-Alamein, and dated to the second century AD (Kiss 2006); in room 2 remains of a painting in a niche styled as an aedicula show an incomplete arc of divinities (Helios, Harpokrates, and Serapis, portrayed as nimbed busts), above traces of another figure. A second devotional picture significantly near the main entrance to the house (room 5S) is a large rectangular panel framed in brown, enclosing an incomplete standing figure of a male divinity, bearded and with a nimbus, holding a cornucopia and probably pouring a libation on to the altar shown in a fragment at the bottom left of the panel. A lance-head just visible by his right shoulder plausibly identifies him as Heron.
Much less is known about the decoration of ceilings than walls. The painter Theophilos’ instructions included the decoration of the ceiling ( kamara) of the larger dining-room, but the work is to be done ‘‘according to the paradeigma’ already agreed, and no further details are given (P. Cairo Zenon III 59444, ll. 9-10). Most likely the painting would have imitated the appearance of coffering, ideally executed in wood or plaster, like the carved and gilded cedar-wood ceiling of Ptolemy IV Philopator’s floating palace (Ath. 5.205c) or the thickly gilded coffering in Kleopatra’s palace (Lucan Pharsalia 10.111-21; for the nomenclature and premium status of this kind of ceiling construction, see Leach 2004). P. Klbln I 52 invites competitive bids for gilding part of the carved wooden ceilings of the portico and entrances to the gymnasium of Antinoopolis in ad 263, listing the typical kinds of geometric shapes used to form the patterns ( hexagons, a tetragon, and lozenges). Such ceilings were familiar also in monumental stone in Egypt (e. g. in the portico of the temple of Thoth at Hermopolis Magna: Parlasca 1998) but more frequently imitated there, as elsewhere in the Roman world, in painting (plate 30; Hope 1988: 174-5).
Painted imitations of structured ceilings are also found in the rock-cut tombs of Alexandria, but attention has recently been drawn to the more unusual representation of textiles in some of these, with reference to the use of actual textile canopies in Macedonian tombs (Guimier-Sorbets 2004). During the later Ptolemaic Period, the decorative programme of Alexandrian tombs begins to show a change in emphasis towards the inclusion of traditional Egyptian funerary iconography, where previously the emphasis was on the representation of architecture, in both constructed and painted features, with limited pictorial content (Venit 2002: 91). A singular exception to this, if the dating to mid - to late second century bc is accepted, are the painted walls from the tomb at Wardian (now transferred to the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, ) with landscape and pastoral scenes, rendered in an unusually fluid style with washes of color defined with linear strokes (Venit 2002: 96-118, pls. v-vii). More than any other pictures yet found these invite the tag ‘‘impressionist’’; in their fluency and confident draughtsmanship they also recall one of the finest of Macedonian tomb-paintings, the ‘‘Rape of Persephone’’ at Vergina (Brecoulaki 2006: 78-99, pls. 13-20).
In painted tombs of the Roman Period throughout Egypt the relative dominance of Egyptian funerary content is striking (corpus of material: Kaplan 1999), sometimes counterpointed by relatively small intrusions of Greek imagery in the depiction of the deceased, or symbolic additions such as the figures of Victories, apotropaic Medusa-heads, or keys to the underworld, motifs that also figure on painted coffins and shrouds (Riggs 2005: 199-201; Parlasca 1991). An exceptional instance of duality at its most literal is provided by the parallel depiction of core scenes from the funerary repertoire of both cultures in two of the burial niches in the ‘‘Hall of Caracalla,’’ the smaller complex located beside the great catacomb with decoration sculpted in relief at Kom el-Shuqafa in Alexandria. Recent study of these faded paintings, originally investigated in the 1900s, under ultra-violet light has made possible a new record in photographs and facsimile drawings (Guimier-Sorbets and Seif el-Din 2001). In each case, the wall above the sarcophagus has been set out in Egyptian style in two registers, the upper centered on the traditional presentation of Anubis tending the mummified body of Osiris on a lion bed, mourned by his sister-goddesses, while the register below depicts in lively figure painting the myth most frequently evoked in Greek tombs, the rape of Persephone (Brecoulaki 2006: 81-3). The parallel decoration continues onto the side walls of the niches.
The myth of Persephone features also in one of the tomb-chapels at Tuna el-Gebel (no. 3 - Gabra et al. 1941: 73-6; Gabra and Drioton 1954: pl.14), a cemetery that presents a more evenly balanced proportion of Pharaonic and Greek material, commensurate with the architectural character of the city which it served (McKenzie 2007: 158-60); no. 16, with apparently cultural rather than funerary reference, portrays the stories of Electra and Oedipus, with Greek inscriptions identifying the protagonists (Gabra et al. 1941: 97-100, pls. xliv-vi; Gabra and Drioton 1954: pls. 15-17). A recurrent feature is the imitation in paint of stone wall revetments, ranging from simple panels to careful depictions of geometric compositions in opus sectile; the stone most commonly evoked in the panels here and elsewhere, with swirling concentric markings in yellow-brown paint, is ‘‘onyx alabaster’’ (banded travertine, quarried at several sites in Egypt, Aston et al. 2000: 59-60). The imitation of stone decoration in the lower zone of the wall is common also to the unusual group of painted rock-cut tombs in cemetery C of the necropolis at Salamuni, near Akhmim; five of them feature zodiac ceilings, with the Greek zodiac depicted in circular format with a variety of divinities forming the center-piece (Neugebauer and Parker 1969: 98-102 nos.73-8, pls. 52-6); in two of these the deceased is represented as a citizen of the Greek east, in the form more familiar in sculpture (e. g. Grimm and Johannes 1975: 20 no.20, pls. 29, 31, 34-5) - a standing figure in tunic and Greek-style mantle, holding a papyrus scroll, in a contrapposto stance which the tomb-paintings, despite their limitations, strive to replicate. This was evidently a significant choice of presentation for the tomb-owner, together with the appropriation from temple architecture of a zodiac. In the tomb of two brothers at Athribis (Wannina) this programme is repeated, but the zodiacs are of a hybrid form incorporating both Egyptian and Greek elements; and here they are explicitly personalized, giving the birth-date of one brother, ad 148 (Petrie 1908: 12-13, pls. xxxvii-viii; Neugebauer and Parker 1969: 96-8 no. 72, pl. 51, after Petrie). Intriguingly, both the inclusion of zodiacs and the contemporary, Greek presentation of the deceased are echoed at a great distance, in the two most celebrated rock-cut tombs at el-Muzawwaqa, at the western end of the Dakhla Oasis, where one owner, Petosiris, is shown in the full-length statue type (Osing et al. 1982: 86-7, pl.32a); the other, Petubastis, in a front-facing portrait bust (Osing et al. 1982: 75-6, pl. 22d).
Amongst Alexandrian tombs of Roman date, that from Tigrane Pasha street (now reconstructed outside the Kom el-Shuqafa catacomb) presents the most striking synthesis of Egyptian and Roman iconography at a point when the authenticity of the former was weakening, and the latter was becoming increasingly similar to styles of tomb-decoration outside Egypt (Venit 2002: 146-59, pls. ix-x). The structure of the ceiling (plate 31) recreates features of a cross-groined vault of a type current elsewhere in Roman tombs from the second century ad on, but the actual decoration is more unusual and perhaps localized, the depiction of a canopy carried on bamboo canes and centered upon the Gorgoneion. The extreme originality of this interior prompts continuing speculation as to the ideology behind this choice of decoration, and the identity of those who commissioned it (Venit 2001). That such strong influences of current Roman styles of tomb decoration were not confined to Alexandria is demonstrated by features in the tombs of Tuna el-Gebel, but also, more surprisingly, at Antaiopolis (plate 32), in a tomb featuring a mixture of Pharaonic funerary scenes with Graeco-Roman ornamentation in the form of floral candelabra and a frieze of awning-pattern (cf. the similarly mixed decoration of graves at Kom Abu Billou: Kaplan 1999: 157-8, pls. 71c, 72a, b). The question of how these motifs were transmitted forms another line of enquiry in which not only the availability of models or pattern-books but also the existence of peripatetic painters need to be examined.
World History
