I had a business meeting in NYC and stayed over to look at the Met Museum's Greece & Roman galleries. Of course everything is spectacular, but I was particularly struck by the fresco installations. There's a set of three that particularly caught my eye. Photos attached (for some reason my pictures didn't come out very well). Anyway, given the really high quality, and to my mind artistic similarities (which my wife, an actual artist, agreed), I wonder if anyone's looked at whether these were done by the same artist(s) as the "Villa of the Mysteries" frescoes?
In his book _A Catalog of Identifiable Figure Painters of Ancient Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae_ (2000), L. Richardson argues (passively) *against* the suggestion: "one has only to consider the comparable rooms in the Villa of Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale [i.e., the Met paintings shown] . . . to realize how far superior to the run of Second Style painters the man who painted this [Villa of the Mysteries] frieze must have been" (26).
ReplyDeleteThere's three rooms with megalographic paintings that seem to have been executed by the same workshop: the Villa of the Mysteries frescoes, the Boscoreale ones (pace Richardson), and the elephants in house 1.6.4 (http://www.pompeiiinpictures.com/pompeiiinpictures/R1/1%2006%2004%20p5.htm). Take a look and make your own decision.
ReplyDelete