Editing Roman art (section)

===Landscape and vistas===
[[File:Pompejanischer Maler um 10 20 001.jpg|thumb|[[Villa of Agrippa Postumus]], [[Boscotrecase]], Third style]]
The main innovation of Roman painting compared to Greek art was the development of landscapes, in particular incorporating techniques of perspective, though true mathematical perspective developed 1,500 years later. Surface textures, shading, and coloration are well applied but scale and spatial depth was still not rendered accurately. Some landscapes were pure scenes of nature, particularly gardens with flowers and trees, while others were architectural vistas depicting urban buildings. Other landscapes show episodes from mythology, the most famous demonstrating scenes from the ''[[Odyssey]]''.<ref>Janson, p. 191</ref>

In the cultural point of view, the art of the ancient East would have known landscape painting only as the backdrop to civil or military narrative scenes.<ref>according to [[Ernst Gombrich]].</ref> This theory is defended by [[Franz Wickhoff]], is debatable. It is possible to see evidence of Greek knowledge of landscape portrayal in Plato's ''[[Critias (dialogue)|Critias]]''  (107b–108b): <blockquote>... and if we look at the portraiture of divine and of human bodies as executed by painters, in respect of the ease or difficulty with which they succeed in imitating their subjects in the opinion of onlookers, we shall notice in the first place that as regards the earth and mountains and rivers and woods and the whole of heaven, with the things that exist and move therein, we are content if a man is able to represent them with even a small degree of likeness&nbsp;...<ref>Plato. ''[[Critias (dialogue)|Critias]]''  (107b–108b), trans W.R.M. Lamb 1925. [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0180%3Atext%3DCriti.|Online at the Perseus Project] accessed 27 June 2006</ref></blockquote>