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.