Painted sheet depicting women dressing and applying make-up (123929)

Painted sheet depicting women dressing and applying make-up (123929)

The fresco, which covers the three blocks of the head of the tomb, portrays a scene which is frequently used in Campanian funerary painting and is typical of the decoration of female burials: the grooming and dressing preparations undertaken by women. To the right, seated on a throne, is the dead woman shown in three-quarter view: her hair is gathered in a red and brown bun, she wears a long white tunic gathered at the waist by a gilded belt from which hangs a white band with red edging and decoration in the same color, and a red cape fastened at the base of the neck. She holds up a golden mirror to her face. On the lefthand side of the composition is the standing figure of a young handmaid, dressed in a white tunic with red decoration; in her right hand, she holds an alabastron containing perfumed oils, while in the other hand she holds a kalathos full of pomegranates, which in funerary symbolism represented rebirth, and which are painted in pairs behind the dead woman. The scene is set in a room whose wall is divided horizontally into two zones, the lower one red and the upper one white, separated by a frieze of flowing waves. From a technical point of view, it is interesting to note the use of foreshortening, a sign that the advances in perspective made by Greek art had been absorbed in the Samnite area.