The Painters of Pompeii

The exhibition, curated by Mario Grimaldi and produced by MondoMostre, is the result of a cultural and scientific collaboration between the Municipality of Bologna | Museo Civico Archeologico and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, which includes the exceptional loan of more than 100 works from the Roman period belonging to the collection of the Neapolitan museum, where the world's largest collection of antiquity is preserved.

The exhibition project focuses on the role of pictores, i.e. the artists and artisans who realized the decorative apparatuses of the houses located in the Pompeii, Herculaneum and Vesuvian areas. The exhibit aims to contextualize their social and economic status in the society of the time, as well as to analyze their techniques, tools, colors and models. In fact, the extremely important heritage of images  – splendid frescoes with still vivid colors, often of large dimensions – that these authors have left us with reflect the tastes and values of a varied commission and allows us to better understand the mechanisms underlying the studios' system of production.

For the first time, Bologna will host masterpieces - just to name a few - from the domus del Poeta Tragico, dell’Amore Punito, and from the Villas of Fannio Sinistore in Boscoreale, and the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum.