Pompeii painters: more than 100 works from Naples in Bologna. Entire Pompeian environments reconstructed

Opening Sept. 23, 2022 at the Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna, I Pittori di Pompei, among the most anticipated exhibitions of the fall exhibition season in Italy, will be on view until March 19, 2023.

Curated by Mario Grimaldi and produced by MondoMostre, the exhibition is made possible thanks to a cultural and scientific collaboration agreement between the Municipality of Bologna | Museo Civico Archeologico and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples that includes the exceptional loan of more than one hundred works from the Roman period belonging to the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

The exhibition project aims to focus on the figures of the pictores, that is, the artists and artisans who created the decorative apparatuses in the houses of Pompeii, Herculaneum and theVesuvian area, in order to contextualize their role and economic status in the society of the time, as well as to highlight their techniques, tools, colors and models. In fact, the splendid frescoes with their still vivid colors, often of large dimensions, give us back the tastes and values of a varied patronage and allow us to better understand the mechanisms of the workshops’ production system. Little information has come down to us about the authors of these pears, and almost no names are known to us. Thanks to the numerous pictorial testimonies preserved after the eruption that occurred in 79 A.D. and brought to light by the great Bourbon excavation campaigns in the 18th century, the Vesuvian towns constitute a privileged observatory to better understand the internal organization and workings of the painting workshops.

For the first time in Bologna, a corpus of extraordinary examples of Roman painting from those domus that became famous precisely for the beauty of their wall decorations will be exhibited. Just to name a few, masterpieces from the domus of the Tragic Poet, of Punished Love, and from the Villas of Fannio Sinistore in Boscoreale, and of the Papyri in Herculaneum. The public will be able to admire a wide selection of the compositional schemes most in vogue in the different periods of Roman art, understanding how some artists knew how to provide an original vision of decorative patterns that were continually varied and updated based on local fashions and styles.

Relive scenes of welcoming guests, refined images of landscapes and gardens, architecture, but also admire the technical tools of design and execution of the work: paints, squares, compasses, plumb lines, preparatory drawings, original finds unearthed during Pompeian excavations, including cups still filled with colors dating back two thousand years. And, again, triclini, oil lamps, pitchers, vases, resurfaced in the excavations and depicted in the very frescoes on display, with which they dialogued in space.

Finally, the exhibition will offer the reconstruction of entire Pompeian rooms such as those of the House of Jason and, in particular, the House of Meleager with its large frescoes with stucco reliefs, to tell the story of the relationship between space and decoration, between the pictores and their patrons.

In Roman times, pictores were seen as skilled craftsmen, and only a few of them achieved, because of the quality and refinement of their creations, the role of artists. Their art, from a craft reserved for the marginal social classes, became an art that qualified those who practiced it.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a rich educational offer aimed at schools of all levels, families and the adult public will be proposed.

Image: Female figure, Pompeii, VI, 9, 2-13, House of Meleager, east wall fresco (1st century AD).

Pompeii painters: more than 100 works from Naples in Bologna. Entire Pompeian environments reconstructed

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