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Luton Painter and Decorator

For my final submit of the ten years I’m likely to go over some words and phrases of the writer who supplied my nom de weblog, ‘Plinius’. In his Natural Historical past, Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) mentions several artists, but the nearest he receives to talking about landscape artwork is in Book XXXV: ‘Nor must I neglect Studius, a painter of the times of Augustus, who released a delightful style of decorating walls with representations of villas, harbours, landscape gardens, sacred groves, woods, hills, fishponds, straits, streams and shores, any scene in quick that took the fancy.’ He then describes some of the people included in these scenes – frequently humorously depicted. ‘He also brought in the vogue of portray seaside towns on the partitions of open up galleries, generating a pleasant impact at a very little cost.’ But for Pliny such frescoes ended up not the business of excellent painters (the celebrated Apelles had no wall paintings in his property). No artists ‘enjoy a genuine glory unless they have painted easel pictures’ (some thing for this year’s Turner Prize winner, Richard Wright, to feel about!)

This short text is all we know about Studius, but Roger Ling printed an fascinating article back again in 1977, in the Journal of Roman Research, that tried to infer far more about the type of paintings he could have been accountable for (‘Studius and the Beginnings of Roman Landscape Painting’). Ling starts by discounting some landscape-associated genres that will not seem to be to correspond to Pliny’s description: (1) mythological landscape as in the well-known ‘Odyssey landscapes’ of the Esquiline (two) the stunning, naturalistic garden portray 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 Area of the Masks. He then argues in opposition to the look at that Studius focused on ‘villa landscapes’, in contrast to the much more pastoral scenes which appear to be explained in the quick reference Vitruvius makes to landscape painting: ‘in corridors simply because of the duration of the surface they created decorations with varieties of landscape, drawing photos from particular characteristics of areas for they paint harbours, promontories, shores, rivers, springs, canals, shrines, groves, mountains, cattle, shepherds.’ By seeking at the available physical evidence, Ling concludes that Studius must have painted landscapes that could suit equally the descriptions of Vitruvius and Pliny, and that the latter mentioned him especially since he had introduced ‘to perfection’ peopled architectural landscape wall-painting in the Augustan time period.

Painted landscape from the Purple Space, Villa of Agrippa Postumus, Boscotrecase

Resource: Wikimedia Commons

Ling discusses three internet sites which could have the variety of landscape painting Studius was renowned for, and even indicates that they could be the operate of Studius himself or his workshop. These are

The Yellow Frieze in the House of Livia, Rome, which has architecture and figures corresponding to the type of scene described by Pliny

Specified 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 Red Place, with an additional humorous detail: a shepherd conversing to hs dog.