Introduction [excerpts]

Introduction / The Villa, its Owner, its Date
The murals examined in this paper comprise some large and many small fragments which are preserved partly in the museum in Naples, partly in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. They were found in four rooms of a villa rustica which was accidentally discovered in 1902 during the construction of the new railway between Boscotrecase and Torre Annunciata in the vicinity of Pompei. Between 1903 and 1905 the area was partly excavated by the owner of the land, Ernesto Santini, but in 1906 an eruption of Vesuvius covered it again and seems to have destroyed the remnants. The record of all finds and a ground-plan were published by M. Della Corte in the Notizie degli Scavi 1922, 459ff. It is now our sole source of information ^

The ground-plan [p. 12] shows that only parts of the villa had been excavated. These consisted of two separate units: to the East servants' quarters and rooms for the processing of agricultural products, to the West a splendid summer residence for the owner.^ The villa was beautifully situated on the hills with a full view to the south of the gulf of Naples. The four rooms in which the extant murals were found belonged to a sequence of cubicula [No. 15-20] to be entered from a southern terrace [D] or promenade. The sequence is interrupted by an exedra or vestibule [No. 17] which connects the terrace with the peristyle.^

Except for two fragments which probably were part of the decoration of room 20 [Della Corte 476], the murals belonged to three rooms: No. 15, the "Black Room"; No. 16, the "Red Room"; No. 19, the "Mythological Room" [Della [p. 9] Corte 468-476]. The Museum in Naples houses the five pieces that are left of the Red Room and three pieces from the Black Room; the Metropolitan Museum acquired most of the Black Room [10 pieces], the remnants of the Mythological Room [5 pieces] and the fragments of room 20 [2 pieces].^ Carrington 128. Dawson 114. All paintings belong to the so-called Third Style, as was immediately recognized by Della Corte.

The murals from Boscotrecase belong among the finest specimens of Roman Painting; among the wall paintings of the Third Style none are superior. The villa itself has an exalted pedigree and its date can be established with a degree of certainty that is not frequent for works of Roman Art, very rare for Roman paintings, and unique for the Third Style^. Within the development of ancient landscape painting the two mythological panels, the three sacro-idyllic landscapes of the Red Room, and the three landscape vignettes of the Black Room are, artistically as well as chronologically, particularly significant.

. . . . There can be no doubt that the proprietor of the villa was Agrippa Postumus [12 B.C.-14 A.D., whose mother was Augustus' daughter Julia . . . . [p. 10]

A villa with decorations of two consecutive styles, if planned and executed as a whole without visible traces of later alterations, should provide us with a precise date. Even without the discovery of the tiles we should have to conclude that the villa was probably built during the transitional period between the Second and the Third Style.