Ancient Paintings

Ancient paintings survive on tomb walls, pottery, wooden panels, and other surfaces from the civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Their subjects connect religious observance and remembrance with portraits, stories, landscapes, and scenes of everyday work. Egyptian tomb paintings often arrange figures through established conventions, while Greek vase painters use line and contrasting colors to tell stories around curved vessels. Nebamun's tomb-chapel paintings combine images of offerings and banquets with closely observed birds and plants, placing earthly abundance within beliefs about the afterlife. Roman frescoes turn domestic walls into painted architecture and gardens; at Boscoreale, columns and cast shadows make flat plaster appear to open onto other spaces. Fayum portraits from Roman Egypt bring individually described faces, painted on wooden panels, into the setting of funerary commemoration.