"Chinoiserie"

Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano e contorni incise con qualche spiegazione. Volume 1 (Naples, 1757),Pl. 39, p. 213

This plate, from the final section of the first volume of Le pitture antiche d'Ercolano, illustrates a commonly found pictorial motif in Roman art. Such architectural fantasies are typical of wall paintings discovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum dated to the late first century C.E. In Le pitture, these architectural fantasies were grouped together into one category. Like the mythological panels and vignettes discussed earlier, these images were completely decontextualized. Although the ercolanesi praised the paintings' aesthetic qualities, they offered no description of where they had been found and how they fit into the larger décor of the rooms from which they had been excised. These architectural paintings were especially intriguing to eighteenth-century viewers, who compared them to "Chinoiserie," i.e. a popular European artistic style inspired by the whimsical representation of landscape and architecture on Chinese porcelain. Like the floating figures from the Villa of Cicero, these Roman architectural fantasies greatly influenced the work of European artists, enjoying a long afterlife in the decorative arts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.