This Newly Reconstructed Wall Painting Gives Us Rare Insight Into Roman London

Yahoo

3 days ago

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After four years of reconstruction, the remains of a painted wall in Roman London, founded in AD 43, have a big story to tell.
Since 2021, archaeologists from the The Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) have been trying to match thousands of pieces of the fallen fresco wall, believed to have come from a luxe villa. Found in Southwark, near the Thames River, it's one of three major discoveries in the same area that's currently being developed by Landsec in Southwark, according to the BBC.
Among the finds is a mosaic floor—the largest of its kind found in the last 50 years. The floor patterns include a guilloche, Solomon's knot, flowers, and geometric patterns, thought to be the work of a known band of mosaicists, called the Acanthus group, who made a distinct style found in other unearthed works in Germany, suggesting that the band traveled. The floor panels were found along with a handful of objects associated with Romans of status. This, alongside the cemetery found at the same site, believed to be for wealthy Romans, leads archaeologists to see the story behind the reconstructed wall as one of Romans investing in Londinium. "There was this thriving, bustling settlement quite early on in the Roman period, and it's almost the kind of wealthy suburb—the Beverly Hills of Roman London," Andrew Henderson-Schwartz of Mola told the BBC.
The patterns revealed after the plaster pieces were put in order by senior building material specialist Han Li and a team of experts show fruit, flowers painted with a rare, bright yellow, people, and instruments like the lyre. Perhaps most curiously, the word 'fecit' appears, which would roughly translate to 'has made this." Though the name that might have followed hasn't yet been uncovered, the team is hopeful. If and when it does, it will tell us who this nearly 2,000-year-old interiors painter to the Roman stars was.
"The group or groups of painters responsible for creating these frescos took inspiration from wall decorations in other parts of the Roman world," writes Mola. "...These paintings were designed to show off both the wealth and excellent taste of the building's owner or owners."
In another interesting turn, however, this wall, painted at some point after Londinium was founded and before AD 150, was torn down, according to Mola, by AD 200. "These beautiful frescoes once decorated around twenty internal walls of the building; however, the enormity of our find wasn't immediately obvious. That's because the decorated plaster was found dumped in a large pit, shattered in thousands of fragments—the result of Roman demolition works to clear the old building."
Fashion, it seems, has always been fickle, and keeping up with it has always been paramount.
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