The study of Roman wall painting has long prioritized formal styles and iconography, with recent attention paid to the visual and spatial significance of murals. In comparison, Roman wall painters, who are often treated as members of anonymous ‘workshops’, have received relatively little scrutiny.[1] This concise volume, however, investigates the paintings at Pompeii, as its title suggests, through the lens of their painters. Francesca Bologna considers how painters worked, contributing a socio-economic analysis of craft production to the vast bibliography of Pompeiian wall painting. In five chapters, she attempts to combine qualitative, stylistic analysis with quantitative analysis of the energetics, cost of production, and standard of living afforded to its makers. Rather than organized by stable workshops, Bologna’s results present painting as an itinerant and precarious craft in Roman antiquity. Her study also sparks methodological questions concerning how to access the makers of extant archaeological artefacts and integrate them within histories of art and economy more broadly.
The book’s aims (‘to address ancient working practices and workforce organization in the Roman world, with specific reference to wall painting’, xv) and structure are outlined in a brief introduction. Chapter 1 sets the stage for the first half of Bologna’s study by introducing attribution by stylistic analysis as her modus operandi, applying the Morellian method – the detailed analysis of (anatomical) features to identify a distinctive artist.[2] Bologna also outlines an enduring scholastic debate on the makers of Roman wall painting: those who believe long-term collaborations between painters existed and were sustained at Pompeii, and those who do not (5). However, as Bologna argues, ‘actual productive times… have never been precisely estimated’ (6). Bologna’s critical evaluation of workshops tests the likelihood of long-term collaboration between painters and highlights her important contribution to the study of Roman wall painting.
Bologna applies her Morellian method in chapter 2, aiming to attribute the handiwork of specific painters in Third and Fourth Style paintings in Pompeii. Bologna focuses on figural, largely mythological ‘panel’ paintings, arguing that these most effectively enable ‘the identification of telling idiosyncrasies’ (15). Having conducted in situ analysis supplemented by (archival) photos, Bologna presents her grouping of attributed works (named after ‘representative’ panels, e.g., ‘Bellerophon painter’) as catalogue-like entries. These describe and contextualise the paintings with perceived ‘diagnostic’ features, based on Bologna’s own criteria and rating scale of quality.
For the analysis of Third Style (c. AD 25-45) Bologna identifies at least 5 stylistic groups based on roughly 138 figural paintings. For the Fourth Style she engages more directly with previous scholarship, analysing the panel paintings of the ‘Vettii Workship’, attributed by Domenico Esposito. As such, Bologna stylistically sorts 240 painted subjects into 15 groups. While distribution analysis of the Third and Fourth Styles differ, they both indicate, for Bologna, ‘fluid and flexible teams’ rather than stable ‘workshops’ operating in the latter half of the century in Pompeii, discovering ‘only one instance of painters working together more than once’ in her analysis of Fourth Styles panels (53).
The chapter concludes with a discussion of patronage, landing on a ‘trickle-down’ model for the creation and distribution of (mythological) images at Pompeii (60, 66). Readers are left to wonder how so-called aristocratic models, as well as ‘common’ or ‘rare’ visual themes in Pompeiian painting design, would form and stabilise (based on the evidence presented).[3] In contrast, her argument of small flexible teams of painters is developed and tested in the following chapters.
Chapter 3 turns to assess her proposed model of painting organisation at Pompeii through the energetics of wall painting. In this way, the chapter forms a quantitative pendant to the previous qualitative one, whereby Bologna evaluates the living standards of her identified painters within a broader economic picture (67). She adapts the methods developed with regards to other forms of construction in the ancient world, relying on 19th and 20th century building manuals and experimental archaeology. Painting techniques and materials are considered to estimate production times and costs of labour and materials (for patrons), yielding some startling results. For example, Bologna proposes that a patron would need at least 1000 sesterces to decorate one Pompeiian room (specifically, room (12) of the Casa dei Pittori al Lavoro) – more than a legionary’s gross pay per annum (900 sesterces) (81).
Bologna’s synthetic approach to calculating the living standards of painters relies on Diocletian’s Edictum de pretiis and Robert Allen’s work on annual subsistence costs (81).[4] Her calculations suggest that figure painters could hardly support a family of three long-term, without conducting extra work within or traveling outside of the city. Likewise, Pompeii could only support the number of artisans required to repaint the city after the 62 CE earthquake on a short-term basis, and relying on itinerant skilled workers (83-84).[5] These results again support her assertion of there being part-time or itinerant teams of painters at Pompeii, composed of either free or enslaved labourers (87). It should also be noted that Bologna is transparent with the manifold uncertainty, assumptions, and variables which inform her estimated figures. For example, when calculating the likely duration of subsistence for figure painters, she provides a range of the lowest and highest values (83).
Chapter 4 situates Bologna’s model of Pompeiian painters within a broader view of pre-industrial craft. Through this framework, she considers the mobility, versatility, specialisation, and apprenticeship of painters. The latter is explored in the greatest detail, as it forms an explicit assumption in Bologna’s identifications of individual painters (e.g., she finds possible ‘apprentices’ in the ‘Punishment of Cupid Painter’ and ‘Dioscuri Painter’). This section synthesizes ancient evidence including apprentice contracts from Roman Egypt, written anecdotes, and comparanda from the medieval and early modern period. Informed by this evidence, Bologna hypothesises a Roman painter’s trajectory from pupil at age 7 to an accomplished artisan with their own students in their 20s (100). She also argues that artisans ‘used and adapted common models’ to explain repeated decorative and figural elements in wall paintings (103).[6]
A final two-page conclusion (chapter 5) summarises the major goals and findings of the study. Bologna offers a new characterisation of Roman painters – contributors as ‘itinerant artisans and small working units comprising a painter and their assistant(s)’ (196), rather than as stable ‘workshops’, hinting at how they might have formed ‘communit[ies] of practice’ (105).
As such, Painting Pompeii sits at the intersection of contemporary scholarship on ancient art and economy.[7] Bologna’s socio-economic analysis of the energetics of wall painting in particular offers an innovative and welcome contribution to the field.
Together, the work includes many useful syntheses and exciting hypotheses. It also introduces interesting questions about skilled artisans in Roman antiquity and in the history of scholarship, which Bologna gestures at but addresses less explicitly. For example, she adopts the taxonomy of the Four Pompeiian Styles (introduced at the outset of chapter 2) without exploring the extent to which their history informs the context of her study and the lacuna she seeks to fill. Attention to the Styles’ reliance on qualitative analysis and perceived stylistic stability might help to account for previous presumptions of anonymous workshops at Pompeii and the relative dearth of scholars attempting to identify individual wall painters (compared to the history of Athenian pots (3)). Similarly, a priori assumptions about the unoriginality of Roman artisans – an issue introduced in the first chapter – are only briefly unpacked from Bologna’s perspective at the end of the volume (100).
Bologna’s admirable concision at times risks eliding the stakes of her intervention. For instance, her conclusion suggests that Rome could sustain at least one ‘workshop’ like those often imagined in art histories, supplemented with smaller, flexible units like those she hypothesises in Pompeii and the Bay of Naples.[8] This short statement spurs questions regarding the big picture upshot of Bologna’s meticulous study reflected through local and regional contexts and scales: how would her findings prompt rethinking the working practices in other places and crafts, on the basis of Pompeiian painters? What do these results indicate about the role of itinerant, skilled craftspeople in the history of art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean? Bologna’s analyses emphasise the precarity of Roman painters, leaving the implications of this precarity for further scholarship to fully grapple with. How might the precarity of an artistic industry, for instance, impact our perception of what constitutes a ‘creative artistic act’ (100)? And how would Bologna’s model of training and organisation have encouraged both similarities of painted surfaces within each of the Four Styles, as well as differences (‘innovations’?) between them?
The volume is well produced with few errors but a brief note on its figures: it almost exclusively reproduces high quality color images of excerpted figural, mythological ‘panels’.[9] This selection of panel paintings results in some descriptions and attributions being easier to follow than others.[10] This largely stems from a sound editorial choice to produce a highly readable, well-illustrated volume (which is not primarily a catalogue), but it does highlight certain challenges inherent in Bologna’s ‘science of attribution’, whereby readers must trust the authoritative eye of the scholar (see note 2). It also provides a reminder that attempts at ‘objective’ identifications of ancient hands are always subject to subjective readings. The figures and tables bolster the author’s argument, but in at least one case I was left looking for a legend to decode the plans with color-coded painters (figures 2.55-2.58 and 2.70 seem to rely on the legend of figures 2.53-2.54, pages earlier).
Aside from these editorial remarks, Bologna admirably provides a new image of painting as an itinerant, precarious, and skilled craft. This volume will be of interest to anyone who is curious about ancient art and labour in general and Pompeiian wall painting in particular. Her ambitious core chapters (2 and 3) will provide reference and fodder for future scholars. Bologna’s study does not resolve all the uncertainties introduced by her hybrid qualitative and quantitative approach to ancient art, nor does it need to: it opens many new lines of inquiry, showing how Pompeii continues to yield fertile ground for researchers seeking to learn more about a variety of people in the Roman world, across a wide swath of disciplinary training. More importantly, it shows how bridging the sub-fields within classical art history/archaeology allows further light to be shed upon some of the most taken for granted presences in the history of Roman art.
Works Cited
Allen, R. 2009. “How Prosperous Were the Romans? Evidence from DiodetianÆs Price Edict (AD 301).” In Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods and Problems, edited by Alan K. Bowman and Andrew Wilson, 317–45. Oxford studies on the Roman economy. Oxford: University Press.
Becker, H. In preparation. Commerce in Color: The Mechanics of the Roman Pigment Trade.
Bianchi Bandinelli, R. 1967. “Arte Plebea.” Dialoghi Di Archeologia 1:7–19.
Clarke, J.R. 2003. Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.c.-A.d. 315. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2021. “How Did Roman Wall-Painters Work?” In The Painters of Pompeii : Roman Frescoes from the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, edited by Mario Mario Grimaldi, 36–43. Rome: Mondo Mostre.
Esposito, D. 2017. “The Economics of Pompeian Painting.” In The Economy of Pompeii, edited by Miko Flohr and Andrew Wilson, 263–89. First edition. Oxford studies on the Roman economy. Oxford: University Press.
Grimaldi, M., ed. 2021. The Painters of Pompeii : Roman Frescoes from the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Rome: Mondo Mostre.
Hopkins, J.N. 2024. Unbound from Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape, Ca. 650-250 Bce. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kampen, N. 1981. Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia. Berlin: Mann.
Maguire, E.D. 2025. “Trickling down, Trickling up, and Holding Things Together with Crossed Diagonals.” In Approaching Social Hierarchies in Byzantium, edited by Anna C. Kelly and Flavia Vanni, 103–27. London: Routledge.
Marlowe, E. 2013. Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Mayer, E. 2012. The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE-250 CE. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Meyboom, P.G.P., and E.M. Moormann. 2013. Le decorazioni dipinte e marmoree della Domus Aurea di Nerone a Roma. Babesch. Supplement 20. Leuven Paris Walpole: Peeters.
Petersen, L.H. 2006. The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2015. “‘Arte Plebea’ and Non-Elite Roman Art.” In A Companion to Roman Art, 214–30. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Squire, M. 2015. “Roman Art and the Artist.” In A Companion to Roman Art, 172–94. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Notes
[1] For discussion, see below, and for notable exceptions, see Bologna 2024, 3-5 especially.
[2] For the broader role of connoisseurship in the development of Roman art, see e.g., Marlowe 2013; Squire 2015.
[3] Even when granting that these were not passive acts of assimilation, and citing Mayer 2012, these assertions largely refrain from engaging with a wide-ranging bibliography on this issue of (‘non-elite’) contribution in ancient art, see e.g., Bianchi Bandinelli 1967; Kampen 1981; Clarke 2003; Petersen 2006; 2015; Hopkins 2024; Maguire 2025.
[4] Allen 2009.
[5] She bases her analysis on estimates of the total painted surface of Pompeii, estimating the total time required to paint it, divided by the minimum number of days a painter would require to make a living (84).
[6] Cf. Clarke 2021.
[7] See, for example, Esposito 2017; Grimaldi 2021, and the forthcoming work of Hilary Becker.
[8] For a relevant case study, see Meyboom and Moormann 2013, on the Domus Aurea, who argue for artisanal teams operating at a large scale over a short period of time in Rome (64-68 CE).
[9] The only walls which are reproduced are of the Casa dei Pittori al Lavoro, figures 3.6-3.8 on page 73 and 75, and one drawing of a contemporary experimental fresco, figure 3.4 on page 71.
[10] For example, when only one image was provided for a comparison, like one of two ‘identical’ bulls attributed to the Jason Painter (23).