Pompeii No.6: Painting the Ionic Capitals

Historic Ornament: A Pictorial Archive   |   C. B. Griesbach   |   Dover

In last week's posting, I painted columns (pilasters, actually) in the Pompeii Room, and now it's time to crown them with capitals.

One of my great pleasures in the process of painting this room is in looking through many art reference books and choosing the elements for the room as though I were actually building a house. And how delightful to know that whatever I do end up choosing will be in stock, as long as I can paint it!

I chose the Ionic capital (above) for an interesting reason. My first choice would have been a Corinthian capital, like the one below:

Historic Ornament: A Pictorial Archive   |   C. B. Griesbach   |   Dover

You can see, however, that the classic Corinthian capital is twice as deep as the Ionic one. As I did my visual calculations, I quickly realized that because the columns don't go all the way to the floor, and are in fact short, the preferred capital would make them appear downright squat. And that would never do!

There are six capitals to be painted, and several shades of auburn and mauve to be mixed, so my approach is to paint all six capitals simultaneously. As I paint one element of a capital, say that highlighted line that goes through the middle, I paint the same highlight on all of them.

That way, all six capitals look like this, with very little variation.

click to enlarge

Here's the Pompeii Room as it appears today.

On the left you can see a block of yellow, which was the original color of the room. In my next posting, we'll turn that into masonry, working our way around the hallway door.
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