Today’s VM 365 image shows another example of a fragment of painted wall plaster from the Roman villa at Minster. An example of high quality naturalistic painting was shown for Day 178.

This fragment of plaster shows paint being used to imitate expensive marble panelling that was often used in very high status Roman buildings. This piece shows a dark panel border dividing two sections of pink marble. The marbled effect has been applied using splashes of dark red, white, black/grey and yellow to achieve the illusion. Large areas of wall surface decorated in this way would have produced a very striking effect intending to emulate the marble clad walls of buildings across the Roman empire.