Local Styles or Common Pattern Books in Roman Wall Painting and Mosaics

The presentations of the panel -Local Styles or Common Pattern Books in Roman
Wall Painting and Mosaics- illustrated various aspects of the working methods of
ancient workshops and their production. I. Bragantini used the example of the wall
paintings in Cartagena and Lyon to emphasise that in her opinion these were made by
Italian workshops. While St. Falzone, M. Marano and P. Tomassini focused on the
characteristics of the local style in wall painting in Ostia, C. Sbrolli
concentrated on the iconographic characteristics of the -Workshop of the Vetti- in
Pompeii. E. Moormann and D. Esposito investigated the question of whether the
development of wall painting in Flavian times testified to continuity or a new
impulse. C. Boschetti et al. highlighted the differences in the production of
mosaics in Aquileia between the Augustan period and the 4th century AD: while the
first workshops worked with high quality materials from Campania and probably came
from there, the later mosaicists were probably local, as they used cheap materials
available locally. B. Tober pointed out that there was an -international- agreement
on the manner of appointing certain rooms for certain functions. E. Aydogdu and A.
Kazim Öz used a mosaic in Metropolis as an example to show that three-dimensional
leaf patterns are also based on models that go back to geometric forms.