This part of a wall painting depicts a leafy plant with two stems arching upward to the left and right from its center. The composition is simple, but the talent of the painter is made evident by the sure and masterful brush strokes applied directly onto wet plaster – the fresco technique of painting which leaves little possibility for mistakes or corrections. The artist constructed the plant with a series of impressionistic, quickly drawn strokes of the brush, first for the leaves and then for the thin stems. A difference in the thickness of paint used for the leaves lends a sense of depth: three leaves on side of the plant opposite the viewer are done with a diluted paint, which adds a subtle three-dimensional aspect to the composition. The panel is defined by neatly drawn white lines, and part of a red painted panel or border is evident at its top edge.

Fresco paintings are known in Roman tombs from an early date and became increasingly popular in private homes of wealthy families. At Pompeii and Herculaneum virtually every residence was decorated with wall-paintings, ranging from simple compositions in minor rooms to richly embellished polychrome schemes of decoration for more important rooms of the household. This particular fragment is from a fresco that can be assigned to Roman painting of the Third Style, which was produced between ca. 20 B.C. and 20 A.D. This style of fresco decoration coincided with the reign of the emperor Augustus and may be considered the court painting style of the Augustan period. The Third Style rejected illusionistic aspects of the Second Style of painting in favor of surface ornamentation. Wall paintings from this period are typically comprised of a single monochrome background such as red, black, and white, with red and black particularly favored. The panels were then enlivened with elaborate architectural or vegetal details.

This particular fragment formed part of the decoration of the dado, the horizontal section running along the lower part of a painted wall, the upper parts of which were decorated with large rectangular panels. A close parallel for this scheme of decoration can be found in a cubiculum (bedroom) and the triclinium (dining room) in the House of the Fruit Orchard (Region I, Insula 9, House 5) at Pompeii. As seen on the wall painting in the triclinium of this house, this fragment possesses a distinctive angular white line jutting into the field at the lower right, which would place it at the lower right hand part of a larger decorated panel. The finest known examples of early Third Style painting come from Boscotrecase and the famous villa that was the country residence of the first Roman imperial family – the family of the emperor Augustus. These paintings, which are comprised of several sections of walls from four bedrooms in the villa, are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples.

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