The fresco features a majestic horse-like creature, known as hippocamp, gently carrying a beautiful female figure known as Nereid through the ocean waves. With her billowing garments and decisive grip on the steed’s muzzle, the Nereid seems to be holding on dedicatedly; her steed, his legs moving beneath the water, transports her with dedication. From a painterly perspective, this vignette is a multidimensional challenge and the artist has handled it exquisitely.This remarkable artwork, a roman wall painting executed in encaustic on plaster, a very difficult technique, is at once a telling record of the technical achievements of the Roman artists, and an evocation of the beauty anddelicacy of the mythological subjects that they often preferred in painting and sculpture.Roman wall paintings were typically executed in fresco, the technique of painting tempera-based pigments over freshly prepared wet plaster. As the plaster dried and hardened, it solidified into a single painted surface, the pigments secured into the matrix of the dry plaster. The fresco technique allows the painter to work quickly and assuredly on the wall surface, with broad strokes of the brush.

Antiquities
Ancient Greek