Friends of the ANU Classics Museum invite you to the Annual General Meeting and talk, Painted walls and tiled floors from Pompeii, Herculaneum and beyond.

Presented by Dr Estelle Lazer, Honorary Research Associate in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney.
Held in the RSSS Auditorium, followed by refreshments in the Classics Museum

Unprecedented numbers of wall paintings and mosaics were preserved in the pyroclastic material that encapsulated the settlements that were destroyed by the 79 CE eruption of Mt Vesuvius. It was suggested that some of the imagery on these reflected lost Greek paintings from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Sections of walls were removed for display in the Royal Palace, a practice that only ended in the second half of the 19th century. The subsequent preservation of the entire decorative program of walls enabled new research to be undertaken and a roughly chronological classification system was established. This lecture will include a consideration of the history of the excavation of wall paintings from the Vesuvian sites and their interpretation.

Dr Estelle Lazer is an Honorary Research Associate in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. Her PhD involved a study of the human skeletal remains of the Pompeian victims of the 79 CE eruption of Mt Vesuvius. This research was published in Resurrecting Pompeii (Routledge 2009). Estelle has spent numerous field seasons in Pompeii. She is currently co-director of the Pompeii Cast Project, which involves a study of all the casts of the Pompeian victims, using CT scans and X-ray analysis; she has worked on archaeological sites in Antarctica, Bahrain, Cyprus and Australia, and has been involved in research projects on a Peruvian mummy and the Egyptian mummies in the Chau Chak Wing Museum collection. She has taught at the universities of Sydney, NSW and UNE.