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Painter and Decorator Welwyn Garden City

For my previous publish of the 10 years I’m going to talk about some words of the author who supplied my nom de blog, ‘Plinius’. In his Natural History, Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) mentions numerous artists, but the nearest he receives to discussing landscape art is in E-book XXXV: ‘Nor should I neglect Studius, a painter of the times of Augustus, who released a delightful style of decorating partitions with representations of villas, harbours, landscape gardens, sacred groves, woods, hills, fishponds, straits, streams and shores, any scene in limited that took the fancy.’ He then describes some of the men and women included in these scenes – often humorously depicted. ‘He also introduced in the fashion of painting seaside cities on the walls of open galleries, producing a pleasant influence at a quite modest expense.’ But for Pliny such frescoes ended up not the enterprise of excellent painters (the celebrated Apelles had no wall paintings in his property). No artists ‘enjoy a genuine glory except if they have painted easel pictures’ (something for this year’s Turner Prize winner, Richard Wright, to consider about!)

This quick textual content is all we know about Studius, but Roger Ling released an fascinating report back again in 1977, in the Journal of Roman Research, that tried out to infer a lot more about the kind of paintings he could have been accountable for (‘Studius and the Beginnings of Roman Landscape Painting’). Ling starts by discounting some landscape-related genres that do not look to correspond to Pliny’s description: (one) mythological landscape as in the famous ‘Odyssey landscapes’ of the Esquiline (two) the gorgeous, naturalistic yard painting in the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta (three) architectural illustration, as in the bed room of the villa at Boscoreale or (4) details of rustic shrines like individuals in the Palatine’s Space of the Masks. He then argues against the look at that Studius concentrated on ‘villa landscapes’, in contrast to the much more pastoral scenes which seem to be described in the short reference Vitruvius helps make to landscape painting: ‘in corridors due to the fact of the size of the area they created decorations with kinds of landscape, drawing photos from specific attributes of locations for they paint harbours, promontories, shores, rivers, springs, canals, shrines, groves, mountains, cattle, shepherds.’ By seeking at the obtainable bodily proof, Ling concludes that Studius must have painted landscapes that could in shape equally the descriptions of Vitruvius and Pliny, and that the latter mentioned him particularly simply because he experienced brought ‘to perfection’ peopled architectural landscape wall-portray in the Augustan time period.

Painted landscape from the Red Place, Villa of Agrippa Postumus, Boscotrecase

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ling discusses three sites which could include the sort of landscape portray Studius was renowned for, and even suggests that they could be the operate of Studius himself or his workshop. These are

The Yellow Frieze in the Residence of Livia, Rome, which has architecture and figures corresponding to the variety of scene explained by Pliny

Specific panels and vault decorations in the Farnesina property, in which Ling detects ‘Studian echoes’, e.g. ‘whimsical figures like the girl leaning disconsolately from a wall’

Landscape panels in the Boscotrecase villa’s Crimson Place, with yet another humorous element: a shepherd chatting to hs pet.