Colour Schemes in Roman Architecture: Aesthetics, Semantics, and Regional Appropriation

Roman architecture was characterised by a rich palette of colours, achieved through the use of natural coloured stones and painting. Evaluating the use of colour in Roman architecture addresses an important part of the built environment. Unlike black-and-white photographs or line-art reconstruction drawings, architecture was conceived, perceived and experienced in colour. Although such statements are accepted by most archaeologists and architectural historians today, details about functional, chronological, and regional variation in Roman architectural polychromy remain to be discovered.
This conference volume is the first book entirely dedicated to the polychromy of architectural orders in the Roman provinces. Its objectives are to present new data on raw materials, painting techniques, and traces of paint on architectural orders, to explore the visual effects for which colour was used on architectural elements and to collate initial observations on the functional, chronological and regional variation of the applied colour scheme in the various areas of the Roman Empire.
The volume brings together the contributions of twenty-five archaeologists, ancient historians, art historians and chemists. The collected essays encompass a wide chronological frame from the 2nd century BC to the 3rd century AD and cover a vast geographical range from modern Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria to Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Libya.

Johannes Lipps holds a chair of Classical Archaeology and is fellow at the Gutenberg Research College at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität at Mainz. He studied Classical archaeology and ancient history in Marburg, Rome, Bonn and Cologne. He completed his PhD in 2008 at Cologne, which was followed by an assistant professorship at LMU Munich from 2009-2014 and a junior professorship at Tübingen from 2014-2019. His research interests concern architecture, urbanism and sculpture especially in ancient Rome and the provinces. Recently, he published the monograph Die Stuckdecke des Oecus Tetrastylos im sog. Augustushaus im Kontext antiker Deckenverzierungen (Rahden/Westf. 2018).

Matthias Grawehr is currently interim Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz. His research is focused on the Near East during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, unfinished ancient architecture and Roman small finds such as lamps and bronze statuettes. He studied classical archaeology, art history and ancient Near Eastern archaeology at the Universität Basel. He has conducted excavations in the Near East and published two volumes on excavations at Petra in Jordan: "Die Lampen der Grabungen auf ez Zantur in Petra" (Mainz 2006); "Eine Bronzewerkstatt des 1. Jhs. n. Chr. von ez Zantur in Petra/Jordanien" (Mainz 2010). In 2019 he completed his habilitation on "Akzidentelle Unfertigkeiten und intentioneller Bossenstil in der Architektur des Hellenismus und der Kaiserzeit". Matthias Grawehr has taught widely at the Universities of Basel, Zurich, and Mainz and coedited volumes on Klassik - Kunst der Könige. Kings and Greek Art in the 4th Century BC (2020) and Economy and Cultural Contact in the Mediterranean Iron Age (2022).