<P> Most of the figures in the frescoes have characteristics of Greek Hellenism or Classicism . For instance, those found in the living room appear to be depictions of either philosophers, such as Epicurus, Zeno or Menedemus, or possibly old kings, like King Kinyras of Cyprus . Similarly, the bedrooms of the Second Style also evoke Hellenistic qualities, such as are seen at the Tomb of Lyson or at Kallikles . At a time when the Roman Republic was ending and classicism somewhat fading, this is considered as an interesting comment on style and taste . Seemingly, Greek representations in the home were considered acceptable, even admired and sophisticated . The images survived the quick succession of Vesuvian cataclysms because of the skill of the fresco work and the absence of organic materials such as indigo, murex purple, red madder among its pigments . The reddening of some of its yellow ochre shows temperatures to have exceeded 300 ° C ." </P> <P> The Metropolitan Museum of Art, together with King's College, London, is building a virtual model of the Villa, linking the scattered frescoes, based on the notes and plan drawn at the time of excavation by archaeologist Felice Barnabei (1902), photographs taken of the excavation, the research of Phyllis W. Lehmann (1953) and axonometric drawings of the plan, locating the images on the walls, by Maxwell Anderson (1987). </P> <P> The fullest reconstruction from original frescoes at present is of a bedroom (cubiculum diurnum), one of the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum since 1903, and since 2007 a feature of the new Roman Gallery . It consists of most of a newly cleaned and reconstructed set of walls entirely painted in highly accomplished fresco . These spacious Roman II Style murals represent their walls as open above socle or dado height, except for the architraves above and a few columns that, together with those other features, frame vividly coloured architectural views of buildings, columns, landscape, garden scenes, religious statues, beyond, emphasizing expansion and grandeur, but including no humans and only a few birds on the short, window wall . This is also the technique in other unreconstructed rooms . For example, In another bedroom, known as Room M, the frescoes depict columns that appear to expand into another room, giving the sense of a much larger, almost unending, space . The facing long walls (19 ft or 5.8 m) of the Metropolitan cubiculum are mirror images of each other, possibly by transfer, with variations . In addition, each is divided into four panels by painted columns . </P> <P> Distance in these paintings is built up through a series of orthogonal architectural surfaces, and indicated by overlap occlusion, foreshortening, diminution, pronounced aerial perspective, but without vanishing points . Modelling is indicated by side - shading with slight, selective cast shadow . Pompeian red in front planes, contrasting with the blue tone of the fainter, further planes, provides an additional effective cue for depth . The room had one, north - facing, outside window, through which pyroclastic flows from Vesuvius appear to have entered . As part of the sophisticated depictive scheme, the dado or lower parts of the walls are depicted as themselves, but in First Style . Ledges and niches there show near objects: "metal and glass vases on shelves and tables appearing to project out from the wall", playfully belying the common impression that perspective is always for depicting recession from the picture plane . In other parts of the Villa there are brightly colored nonfigurative walls, in First Style, some of which are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre Museum . </P>

The paintings in the house of publius fannius synistor