Fig. 254.—Capitals of pilasters, showing free adaptations of the Corinthian type.
The lower third of the columns also was painted a bright red or yellow—a treatment that would have been abhorrent to the taste of the Tufa Period. The desire for variety and brilliancy of color increased, and was more pronounced in the years immediately preceding the eruption than at any previous time.
Consistently with this change in the standard of taste in regard to details, the Pompeians no longer had pleasure in the ample dimensions of the olden time. Houses were not now built with high rooms, great doorways, and lofty columns as in the Tufa Period. The rooms were smaller and lower, and also, we may add, more homelike. But curiously enough, the columns were often made thick as well as short, doubtless in order to afford more space for the display of color on the capitals and the lower part of the shaft.
Roman public and religious architecture in most cities still adhered to the forms of marble construction, a suggestion of which we find in the white walls of the temple of Isis; but the lower third of the columns in the colonnade about this temple was painted red, and the entablature was no doubt ornamented with colored designs, as was that of the temple of Apollo. The best preserved example of this last phase of Pompeian architectural ornamentation is in the semicircular vaulted niche at the right of the Street of Tombs.
Thus we see accomplished at Pompeii, in less than two centuries, a complete revolution in matters of taste, so far as relates to architecture. An entirely new feeling has been developed. The beauty of contour and of symmetrical proportion found in the Greek architecture had no charm for the Pompeian of the later time; its place had been usurped by a different form of beauty, that produced by the use of a variety of brilliant colors in association with forms that were intricate, and often grotesque.
PLATE XI.—ARTEMIS. COPY OF AN ARCHAIC WORK