In 1873 August Mau published his ground-breaking discovery that the wall paintings in the houses of Pompeii do not date back to the town’s last twenty or thirty years, before it was buried by the Vesuvian ashes in 79 A.D., but to a period of more than two hundred years, documenting domestic culture during the transition from Late Hellenistic to Imperial times. Consequently, the contexts of decoration were stylistically distinguished. But the owners’ reasons for not replacing older decoration, parts of which were almost two hundred years old, by more modern painting, have not been questioned so far. This gap is closed in the presented work by examining the murals’ micro-historical context. Gradually, a rationality becomes apparent in the way that ancient house owners would have entire rooms or just certain walls redecorated following recent painting trends, at the same time preserving and restoring already existing, older decorations and/or fusing them with contemporary elements to a seemingly harmonious, amalgamated whole.weiterlesen