| Paintings and mosaics in Pompeii and Ercolano: |
Monochromes on marble
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The collection of ancient paintings in the Naples
Museum also includes and indeed boasts the presence of nine
small prestigious paintings on marble. These are usually treated
as monochromes but more thorough photographic analyses carried
out recently with the aid of ultraviolet and UV fluorescence (V.
von Graeve in DdA 1984, 2 pp. 89-113) have detected the use of
other colours apart from ochre, which is only the colour visible
to the naked eye. Especially in the two that are featured in
this exhibition, it has been observed that the clothes belonging
to Leto, Niobe and daughters have been painted in yellow and
pink, while their sandals are sketched in black and red, with
black also being utilised for the hair. Furthermore, there are
is tonal variation for the expression of shade and size, while
the picture featuring the Centauromachia shows the use of brown
and pink for skin tones, yellow for the Lapith woman's cloak,
and red for the young hero's hair and cloak.
These drawings, and in effect it is only proper to talk of
coloured drawings inasmuch as it is clearly possible to detect
the sketched outlines and those which make up the details, have
their origins in the famous tradition of painting which for ease
of comparison can be identified in the decorated ceramics of the
5th century B.C. and which certainly comes from the school of
Zeuxis the great painter who worked in the last thirty years of
the 5th century B.C. in Magna Graecia, Sicily, Macedonia,
Ephesus and Athens. These pictures were intended to be framed;
that depicting the astragal players, for example, is thinner
around its edges and that showing the Centaur has metal plates
inserted where the stone is thinner; this treatment would
certainly not have been necessary if the picture had been
plastered into the wall. They were probably hung on the wall
like the Farnesina pictures which, like these, can be rightly
called oligochromes rather than monochromes.
Subjects portrayed in the other pictures are a scene from a
play, Silenus tired,the death of the Niobids, Hercules and the
Hydra, a sphinx and a chariot-race with an apobates.
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Fonte: MANN
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