In his ground-breaking article “Perspektive als symbolische Form” Erwin Panofsky argued for the fundamental significance of modes of spatial depiction in the visual arts for cultural history. In line with Panofsky’s approach, changing modes of spatial depiction in Graeco-Roman art have been interpreted as indicators of cultural historical change too, as e.g. in Tonio Hölscher´s important works on changing images of war. This paper adopts a different approach. Differences in the modes of spatial depiction are explained as media phenomena responding to the specificities of picture-genres. Taking the very different treatments of ‘landscape’ in Attic vase-painting (treated as a contrasting comparandum) and in Romano-Campanian wall-painting as a case-study, my aim is to demonstrate how these differences correspond to the respective types of decoration, their specific requirements and their context: Athenian drinking vessels for the symposion and adorned walls as decorum of the Roman upper-class-house.

This paper analyses intermedial relationships between different systems of representation of landscape to tackle the role of medium in the principle of decor/decorum. I focus on representations of nature in wall paintings as well as framed views of nature within and beyond villas together with contemporary literary ekphraseis in order to shed light on the interconnectedness between representations and views of nature in Roman decorative contexts. I argue that the parat-actic placement of intermedial landscape representations was an appropriate design strategy in villa architecture and decoration that fabricated a mise en abyme effect in the villas' spaces. These landscape representations and designs, together with contemporary literary ekphraseis, point to the cultural processes by which Romans articulated their notions of landscape. The intermedial representations of landscape and their paratactic arrangement were appropriate design strategies in Roman villa decoration.