Fig. 266.—A fruit piece, Xenion.
The still-life paintings represent all kinds of meat, fish, fowl, and fruits. According to Vitruvius, this kind of picture was called Xenion. The reason given for the name recalls a curious custom of ancient Greece. When a guest, xenos, was received into a Greek home, says this writer, he was invited to sit at the table for one day. After that provisions were furnished to him uncooked, and he prepared his own meals. A portion of unprepared victuals thus came to be called xenion, 'the stranger's portion,' and the name was afterwards transferred to pictures in which such provisions appear. A fruit piece, now in the Naples Museum, is shown in [Fig. 266].
Landscapes are numerous and of all sizes. Occasionally a garden wall of the fourth style is covered with a single large painting, in which villas, gardens, roads, and harbors are realistically presented. Such pictures are of Italian origin; the name of the artist who first painted them is probably Sextus Tadius, but the reading of the passage in which the name occurs (Plin. N. H. XXXV. x. 116) is uncertain.
Common to the third and fourth styles are garden scenes, in which, behind a light barrier, the plants of a garden appear, with birds, statues, and fountains. The finest extant example is in the villa of Livia, at Prima Porta, near Rome.
Fig. 267.—A landscape painting.
Large landscapes sometimes have a place in the principal panels of the walls. These are all of Hellenistic origin, and are found almost without exception in the decoration of the third style. They generally represent a quiet nook of woodland, with high cliffs; in the foreground is a shrine—perhaps more than one—with figures of men sacrificing or coming to offer worship.
The great majority of the landscapes, however, are introduced into various parts of the decoration outside of the large panels, and are quite small. In them we see little shrines or villas by the seaside; a river with a bridge on which a traveller appears crossing the stream; or buildings on an island or peninsula in the edge of a body of water, as in [Fig. 267]. Often they are simply light sketches; now and then one of these small landscapes is painted in a peculiar tint, as if the scene were represented by moonlight.