The Emperor Nero ousted the art of wall painting as a court art, leading to its gradual loss of prestige as a form of decoration. This is shown by studies of the wall paintings in the Domus Aurea (Golden House), which Nero had built between the fire which devastated Rome in 64 AD and his death in 68 AD. Dutch archaeologists -financed by the NWO's Council for the Humanities- have found that the imperial apartments had walls covered in marble and that wall painting was only used to decorate the less important parts of the complex.
By using marble to decorate his palace, Nero would seem to have been attempting to present himself to the Senate and the Roman people as a ruler in the Hellenistic mould. (The Hellenic rulers in the Eastern Mediterranean had also decorated their palace walls with marble.) The archaeological team -from Leiden University and Amsterdam University (UvA)- were able to determine this on the basis of the hierarchical structure of the various types of wall decoration.
Depending on its function, the apartments in the Domus Aurea had a different type of wall decoration. The status of the apartment appears to have been proportional to the amount of marble used. The walls of the imperial apartments were faced entirely with marble and those of the courtiers up to two-thirds of the height. In the inter-connecting areas, only the dado was faced with marble. Only subordinate service apartments were decorated entirely with wall paintings.
Until the reign of Nero, Roman wall painting was a flourishing and creative form of interior decoration, as we can see at Pompeii and Herculaneum. From then on, its quality gradually declined, as shown by the houses at Ostia.
The archaeologists also discovered that the painters who decorated the Domus Aurea came from three workshops, each of which decorated part of the complex in its own style. As the complex was nearing completion, the painters were occasionally deployed to paint other areas.
The Golden House is the only Roman imperial residential complex whose decoration has been preserved. The preserved section consists of a wing comprising approx. 150 rooms. The complex was discovered in about 1500 and the wall paintings found there gave a new impetus to European painting. The grotesque paintings in the loggias of the Vatican by Raphael's school, for example, were inspired by the paintings in the Domus Aurea, which has been open to visitors again since last summer.
Further information:
Dr. P.G.P. Meyboom (UL)
T +31 71 527 2411, 71 527 2438 or 70 324 1970
E-mail secretary@arch.leidenuniv.nl
or
Dr. E.M. Moormann (UvA)
T +31 20 525 2562
E-mail : E.Moormann@hum.uva.nl
The Netherlands Institute in Rome is to publish a monograph on the research findings in 2000 as a contribution to Roman archaeology.