fishermen, snarers of birds, hunters and vine-dressers; also swampy
passages before beautiful villas, and women borne by men who stagger under
their burdens, and other witty things of this nature; finally, views of
sea-ports, everything charming and suitable":--a fairly long and
comprehensive list of subjects, truly, from which a patron might pick and
choose, or an artist might execute!

Although the great architect Vitruvius strongly denounced this new
striving after scenic effect and characterized it as petty and false, yet
none can deny that these cheerful scenes with their bright colours and
their agreeable if trivial subjects were singularly well adapted to
improve the appearance of the bare narrow rooms, the meagre proportions of
which seem to us absolutely incompatible with plain comfort, to say
nothing of luxury. Space may be increased, so far as the eye is concerned,
by an architectural or landscape painting ingeniously conceived, and thus
the restricted rooms seem to obtain by means of this new system of
decoration a wider expansion, and with it an increased sense of ease and
lightness. The invention of Ludius became at once the fashion, the rage;
and all Rome began to cover the walls of its narrow chambers with these
novel designs, which had already found favour in Imperial circles.
Campania, where the old Greek love for polychrome still lingered, was not
slow in imitating the new taste of the Capital, so that Pompeii bears
undoubted testimony to the popularity of this revolution in artistic
ideas, which substituted a lighter freer method for the old conventional
severity of treatment. Experts profess to trace--and none will endeavour to
gainsay them--a marked difference between the frescoes executed before the
earthquake of 63 and those undertaken subsequent to that date. The wall
paintings of the first group, carried out when the art was comparatively
novel, are superior in harmony of colour, in choice of themes and in
technical finish to those which belong to the latter period, the sixteen
years that intervened between the earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius.
From this circumstance it has been inferred, not without reason, that this
particular house must have passed some time before the year 63 out of the
possession of people of good taste into the hands of vulgarians, ignorant
of the fundamental principles of art and anxious only to obtain what was
startling and garish. As freedmen, the two Vettii woul