Corrado, CrispinHansen, IngeCourtnay, Christ2024-10-212024-10-212020Courtnay, Christ. "Pulling Back the Curtain: Exploring the Artistic Motif of Cloth as Depicted in Ancient Roman Wall Paintings". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2020.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/555Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2020.Along the Bay of Naples, sit a few towns covered by the ash and rubble of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The wall paintings from these domestic residences form the body of imagery that this thesis examines, focused on one particular motif: depictions of woven cloth when draped or hanging from architectural elements. It purposefully excludes instances of painted cloth when used to depict clothing or household items, such as those transparent pieces of cloth draped over produce. Similarly, this paper only includes those images that can be found in the Roman domus and villa, ignoring those examples which might be found in distinctly public buildings, in order to create a sufficiently specific topic. Primarily working with and from this body of 49 images, this thesis also relies on ancient textual sources and more recent developments in art historical methodology to synthesize and explore the relationship between the domus and Roman society, and to understand how that relationship might affect the choice of decoration. This thesis attempts to ascertain the function of the painted fictive woven cloth attached to architectural elements in wall paintings from the 1st century BC and 1st century AD in the Bay of Naples. It proposes three reasons to answer why this particular motif was chosen, how it functioned within the decoration of the wall, and how this motif would have interacted with the room as a whole.vii, 58 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Rome (Empire)Social life and customsThesis