STEVEN ZUCKER: It's a hot day in Rome,
but the ancient Romans had figured out how to stay cool.
BETH HARRIS: They did.
We're in a room that reconstructs
a room in the villa of Livia.
Livia was the wife of the emperor, Augustus.
There was a lovely summer house, a resort, of sorts.
And in the villa, there was one room
that was partially underground, dug into the rock.
STEVEN ZUCKER: Which meant they would
stay much cooler in the summer.
BETH HARRIS: And we can really appreciate that today.
STEVEN ZUCKER: But the sense of coolness
would come not only from the actual temperature,
but also from the decoration.
BETH HARRIS: From the very cool colors
that this room is painted in, what the artist
did was paint an amazing illusion of a landscape,
a garden, as though the walls were not walls at all,
but views out beyond a fence, beyond a wall, with trees
and bushes and fruits and plants and birds.
STEVEN ZUCKER: It's as if the walls have literally dissolved,
and this is the great example of the second style of Roman wall
painting.
BETH HARRIS: The first style was characterized by an attempt
to recreate in paint and stucco the marble walls that we've
decorated Greek palaces.
STEVEN ZUCKER: A kind of faux marble,
a kind of trompe l'oeil.
BETH HARRIS: Exactly.
Now here, instead of the illusion of marble,
the artist has created an illusion of nature.
STEVEN ZUCKER: And it's nature that spreads out all around us.
And it's not a menacing nature.
It's a beautiful, cultivated nature.
It's full of playful birds.
There's fruit in the trees.
There are blossoms everywhere.
BETH HARRIS: And there's light.
The artist has used atmospheric perspective,
so that the trees and the leaves that are closest to us
are rendered more crisply than the vegetation
in the background.
STEVEN ZUCKER: The only real architecture
that's represented is, as you mentioned,
a straw fence, perhaps, within something
that looks a little bit more substantial, in a pink-gray.
The artist has used that outer wall in order
to create a subtle rendering of perspective.
And you can see that, as the wall reaches out
in a couple of places to enclose trees
that are just at the border.
BETH HARRIS: So we see poppies and roses and irises
and pomegranates and--
STEVEN ZUCKER: Quince.
BETH HARRIS: So there's a real sense of variety in the plants,
in the flowers, in the fruit, in the types of birds that we see,
in the positions of the birds-- some with their wings stretched
back, some sitting quietly, some in the sky.
There's a real search for the variety of nature.
My favorite part is on this one tree
that is framed by that pinkish-gray wall.
The branches move in exactly the haphazard way
that a tree grows.
And then there are places where we see light
on the leaves and branches and other places
where the leaves are in shadow.
STEVEN ZUCKER: It seems as if, actually, there's
a breeze that's come up.
And it's blown some of those leaves over,
so that we're seeing the more silvery underside.
And then we get the darker shadows
of the tops of the leaves.
So there's this real sense of the momentary,
and of this being a breezy, beautiful day.
BETH HARRIS: Yeah, you can almost
hear the leaves rustle in the wind.
STEVEN ZUCKER: I think my favorite plant is probably
the acanthus that grows up around a pine on one
of the short sides of the room.
And probably the other element that I find most interesting
is that in this open-air space, there is perched precariously
on that outer wall a bird cage.
Now, throughout this entire room,
there are paintings of birds that
are free, and flying through the open sky.
But here we have a bird in a cage.
And it reminds me, as I stand in this room,
that although these walls have dissolved, I'm still inside.