"The False-Door: dissolution and becoming in Roman wall-painting" is an e-
monograph by Maurice Owen (Southampton Solent University), accessible via
this URL:
http://creadm.solent.ac.uk/custom/rwpainting/cover/index.html
It examines the impact that the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum had on
the modern world - from Neoclassicism to Disaster movies and unpacks the
numerous modern filters through which we view this period in antiquity.
It also puts forward new theories concerning the reasons why Pompeian
artists, in 50BC, used false-door motifs in conjunction with highly sophisticated
forms of linear perspective, 1400 years before it was ‘invented’, in order to
create 3-dimensional, domestically located, virtual reality environments. The
thesis proposes that the wall-paintings were designed to psychologically
transport the viewer to divine and ancestral worlds, mainly for cathartic
reasons. This approach challenges the previous 250 years of discourse that
defines them in purely decorative terms.
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