Abstract
Although Roman landscape painting forms a rather small subset of the whole corpus of Roman art, it can be analysed from many different perspectives. In this paper I choose the perspective of the muralist who was commissioned to invent and paint a landscape on the patron's wall.
This task was certainly eased by existence of pattern books or "cartons" which did not contain just various versions of decorative bands as was suggested in the past, but quite certainly also included pictures or at least descriptions of particular pieces of architecture, both natural and man-made landscape elements, visual shortcuts, and sometimes even the whole scenes including figures. By combining these given elements, either freely or according to the patron's wishes, a more or less creative virtual world emerged and was available for the patron, his family, and guests to admire or even immerse in, as I will demonstrate on material from sites in the Bay of Naples.
This way of creating environments is very much alive even today, when video game designers create maps and landscapes in which the audience can immerse, all by using libraries of predefined objects, combining them to create a desired effect.