On a Tuesday in November, with the Campanian light falling through the east windows at the angle the painter once intended, I stood in a room unchanged for two millennia. The Triclinium of the Villa of the Mysteries holds twenty-nine life-sized figures in a continuous frieze around all four walls. Nothing prepares you for the red.
What the Painter Knew
The prevailing view holds that the frieze depicts a young bride's initiation into the Dionysiac mysteries. She sits half-draped while a winged figure scourges her back and a priestess reveals the sacred rites. Behind them stretches the cinnabar — mercuric sulfide, the most costly pigment in the Roman world, applied without restraint to every surface of the room.
The painter worked in wet plaster, racing the setting lime, and the figures hardened into the wall just as Vesuvius sealed the room in ash for seventeen centuries.