From landscapes to still life, from stage décor to street painting, and from portraits to mythological subjects revisited by the Roman mind, this exhibition Pittura Romana. I colori dell'Impero (Painting in Ancient Rome. The Colors of Empire) will address all of the themes popular in Roman painting between the first century C.E. and late antiquity. It will consist of five separate sections, with such intriguing titles as: "Deceptive Walls: Denying Space", "Light and Shade", "Ancient Pinacothèques", "The City Speaks: Indoors and Out" and "From the Rediscovery of the Domus Aurea to the Grotesque".
The exhibition will feature perfectly reconstructed rooms with their frescoes and even a columbarium, to do full justice to the strength and liveliness of Roman painting and to its astonishing skill in highlighting both the real and the whimsical aspects of ancient Roman society, thus putting paid once and for all to the tale of Roman painting's total and passive dependency on the legacy of Classical Greece.

The Scuderie del Quirinale, from September 24 2009 until January 17 2010, will showcase Roman Imperial Painting: frescoes, portraits on wood and on glass, decorations and landscapes from patrician domus, as well as popular houses and shops from the most important archaeological sites and museums in the world.
The exhibition is Under the High Patronage of the President of the Italian Republic, and is organized by the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and MondoMostre, in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Soprintendenze of Rome and Naples, with the sponsorship of SISAL.
This is the first time an exhibition is completely devoted to the paintings of the ancient Rome, and it will be presented in the theatrical installation of Luca Ronconi and Margherita Palli. Curated by Eugenio La Rocca with Serena Ensoli, Stefano Tortorella and Massimiliano Papini, the show’s goal is to retrace the central role of painting in the roman civil society, emphasizing its originality and going beyond the acquired concept of a passive dependency from Greek art. It will also highlight an amazing continuity with the modern figurative culture, from the Renaissance onwards.
The ancient world was a coloured world, where historical, mythological events but also aspects of the nature and the daily life, were reproduced using realism and poetry.
All public monuments, statues and marbles were nearly always coloured: white marble was always inserted within a complex chromatic scheme. Sculptures and stuccoes were lively and charmingly painted.
Nevertheless, it has become commonplace to identify the “classic” with the transparency of white marble. Time cancels colours, destroys wood, washes and cleans so that all that is left is white marble and white stone. Of paintings and decorations in the houses and monuments very little is left and practically nothing painted on wood remains today.
This is why it is difficult to imagine the ancient world as a coloured world. The discovery of Pompeii and Hercolanum in the middle of the seventeenth century could have changed this attitude but under the influence of a classicist theory the ancient world has continued to be imagined as a white world.
This is very far from a historical reality: for Romans as for Greeks before them, real art was painting not sculpture: this is what this show is about.
Roman Imperial Painting is an exhibition that documents the development of roman painting through the centuries: born out Greek art, it will in turn be a model for the following centuries. At the Scuderie the visitor will be able to appreciate the quality of roman art in its highest form as well as the close but distant relationship between ancient and modern art: from the Renaissance to Impressionism all we know is linked to the ancient world.
Roman painters, for instance, like our modern impressionists, used a fast painting technique, in spots, with touches of color based on a subjective interpretation. Not only is this technique already present in roman times, but the qualitative level of some frescoes seems to anticipate artistic solutions of the 1500's and through to the 1800's.
But ancient art also diverged from modern techniques: we can see this in the spatial conception of a roman painter. Romans were not interested in the system of linear perspective which will be “invented” by Italian architects in the first decades of the 1400's: Roman distributed objects freely in space, without rigid perspective constrictions. In such a way there is no fusion between space and objects, who seem to be flanking one another, or one over the other, leaving an impression of instability.
The exhibition will first focus on landscapes, views of villas and rural sanctuaries populated by little figures that remember the Neapolitean presepi, followed by a choice of imagery from Greek mythology: Amore and Psiche, Polifemo and Galatea, Ercole and Telefo, Perseo and Andromeda just to name a few. But the exhibition will also highlight scenes of daily life, erotic images and still lives which abounded in roman imagery.
Portraits are separate chapter. For the first time visitors will be able to admire a direct comparison of roman portraits on fresco, mosaic or on glass, unearthed in Italy, with the most celebrated roman portraits from the Egyptian oasis of El Fayyum.
The exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale will also go beyond Pompeii (destroyed by the Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 A.D., during Titus): it will extend to the art of an Empire under the reigns of Domiziano, Traiano, Adriano and Marco Aurelio. The art of the Roman Empire goes well beyond Pompeii, to the thresholds of the late-ancient Empire, to the age of the last great princes of the roman Empire, Costantino and Teodosio.
Over one hundred, extraordinary pieces of perfect elegance and refinement will be lent by the most important archaeological sites and museums of the world: the Louvre, British Museum, the Staatliche Museen of Berlin, the Antikensammlung in Munich, the Liebighaus of Frankfurt, the Museum of the University of Zurich, but also the Archaeological Museum of Naples, Pompeii, the Roman National Museum and the Vatican Museums in Rome.

© MondoMostre

With the exhibition Roma. Pittura di un Impero (Rome. The Painting of an Empire) the Scuderie del Quirinale presents the figurative representation of a crucial period in Roman history, from the 1st century BC to the 5th AD. Six centuries which saw the Roman Empire rise and develop, from the advent of Julius Caesar in 49 BC to the extraordinary consolidation of advanced power structures that could hold such a vast territory together.

In this period of time colonial expansion gave rise to a cultural ferment of rare intensity, to such a degree that the art of imperial Rome may be considered a source of inspiration for cultural and aesthetic canons that left their mark on the whole of subsequent western painting and art. Roman painting may be framed in this context not only in its formal aspect but also as an authentic language by images, revealer of aspects of the collective imagination and correlated with the more general system of representation of a concrete society, the foundations of all subsequent civilisation.

Gaining in-depth knowledge of painting production, one of the most immediate and authentic expressions, on the one hand may contribute to a more multifaceted understanding of Roman society while on the other hand can provide the tools for evaluating the originality of this production, going beyond the view of Roman painting as a derivation and passive heir of classical Greek heritage.
From landscape to still life, from stage design to popular painting, from the portrait to myth reinterpreted in accordance with the Roman tradition, the exhibition reveals all the themes of antique painting by means of great frescoes, refined portraits on wood, decorations, friezes and views of great vitality, recovered from both the patrician domus and the ordinary home or shop. Around 100 works of exceptional elegance and refinement, organised in five sections in such a way as to reconstruct the complexity of a figurative school from which development of modern pictorial genres derived, starting with Raphael to name only one example.

They are all loan works from the world's most important archaeological sites and museums, including the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the archaeological museums of Munich, Frankfurt and Zurich, not to mention the Naples Archaeological Museum, the Pompeii Excavations, the National Museum of Rome, the Vatican Museums and the Capitoline Museums of Rome. Famous and highly frequented places where, however, the individual work may sometimes be lost. The value of the exhibition in fact lies also in the ‘revelation' of magnificent and famous pieces by seeing them in the light of a wholly new interpretation, in a context devised by the great theatre director Luca Ronconi who has returned once more to curate the setting up of a great exhibition.