A large part of the interior of 120 or more boxes of plaster fragments have been enticed home into readable pictures at In Roman Southwark. The task begins where most archaeology leaves it, not where it lies on the ground, but on a table, where lights, and hands trained to read the joins between hairlines, and dust of pigment, are the evidence.
The fragments were once on a high status structure on the other side of the Thames of the civic centre of Londinium, in a riverside quarter which was later likened to an exclusive enclave. The decoration of its rooms was made about 43150 C.E. in style, and before 200 C.E. it had been spoilt into a mound of broken plaster by demolition. The broken skins of painted wall had been found by excavators at one location, now called The Liberty, by London Bridge, where a rare Roman mausoleum and massive mosaics have also been discovered.
It has been reconstruction that has required an eye to discern patterns which were never intended to be viewed individually. Fragments belonging to various rooms were then thrown in one heap, and several were often so delicate that they would have been lost if ever touched. A press release by senior building material specialist of the Museum of London Archaeology indicated the beginning of the work: “This has been a ‘once in a lifetime’ moment, so I felt a mix of excitement and nervousness when I started to lay the plaster out.” What ensued was not so much of restoring a single picture, as of a system of interior design, panel by panel, and border by border, and in the process coming to terms with the fact that whole areas, and particularly upper friezes, were in most cases broken beyond repair when walls collapsed.
With the amount of joins, the color palette of the villa, as well as its aspirations, came into the limelight. The biggest of them has been urged to measure about 5 meters by 3 meters, the bottom band being painted to represent pale pink marble, and the top field being covered with numerous bright yellow panels, bordered with darker spaces. The detail is close to the monumental: white long-necked birds, fruit and flowers, delicate foliage, candelabra motifs, and lyres. And one of the clearest indications is the manner in which the paint was applied–there being reason to conclude that extensive portions were initially washed in yellow and subsequently arranged in darker lines–a time-saving process which nevertheless allowed finesse in the tiniest worked detail of the picture.
That yellow matters. Although yellow is used in the Roman wall painting throughout the empire, it is a relatively rare colour in Roman Britain as the primary colour of panels; there are similarities seen at places like the Fishbourne Roman Palace and Xanten. In Southwark it is over a dado, which is doing wealth, with paint that passes as materials that would have been costly to bring in. The plaster walls are painted to resemble red Egyptian porphyry and giallo antico marble, making it a sort of stage set of a status. Even small traces of Egyptian blue, an artificial hue that was valued in the Roman world, enhance the feeling that the rooms were designed to impress the people who knew such gestures.
The most prominent lesson to Modern Engineering Marvels readers can be a logistical, not an aesthetic one: these paintings are preserved partially because the walls of ancient London were frequently made of timber and clay, which has low reuse value. When this type of building was demolished, they could be disposed of instead of being quarried as salvage, so the painted plaster was dumped and buried, and centuries later was found as an unintentional repository of craft.
Voice is also recorded in the fragments, deliberate and accidental. One of them bears the Latin word “FEcIT” (“has made this”) between a tabula ansata, or type of ornamental label with which signatures are marked; the name is detached. Other marks are accidental additions, made when the plaster was hard, such as an almost complete Greek alphabet cut in with a steady hand, and drawn faces and figures. They combine to transform the frescoes into unadulterated decoration to the evidence of a workplace, of planning, of revision, of the banal desire to leave a mark on a freshly painted surface.
The output is not an image reclaimed, but a reclaimed building culture: a site where professional painters took empire-wide images up to provincial boom towns and modified them to local needs, room use, and budgets with the result that the hardest bits of the jigsaw are frequently the ones which were once in the highest part of the wall.
