Didaskalia - Visual Resources

During the first few centuries of Roman theatrical practice, no permanent theatres were constructed at all; the first such theatre that of Pompey, was not built until 55 B.C.. Numerous wooden theatres, sometimes extremely elaborate ones, are known to have been built, but were always torn down afterwards. Little can be known about these stages beyond what can be deduced from the surviving plays themselves, by the Roman comic authors Plautus and Terence.

The Roman architect Vitruvius, writing at the time of Augustus, recorded that Roman mural painters sometimes depicted stage sets on the walls of the houses they decorated. The technique they used skenographia, literally means “scene-painting” and was first used by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C. to embellish the flat façade of their stage building, the skene.

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Room of the Masks wall painting	Room of the Masks 3D reconstruction	Villa of Oplontus wall painting	Villa of Oplontus 3D reconstruction

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