Arts of roman period

Roman art refers to the visual arts made in Ancient Rome and in the territories of the Roman
Empire. Roman art includes architecture, painting, sculpture and mosaic work. Luxury objects in
metal-work, gem engraving, ivory carvings, and glass, are sometimes considered in modern
terms to be minor forms of Roman art, although this would not necessarily have been the case for
contemporaries. Sculpture was perhaps considered as the highest form of art by Romans, but
figure painting was also very highly regarded. The two forms have had very contrasting rates of
survival, with a very large body of sculpture surviving from about the 1st century BC onwards,
though very little from before, but very little painting at all remains, and probably nothing that a
contemporary would have considered to be of the highest quality. A lot of times art came from
Greece
Ancient Roman pottery was not a luxury product, but a vast production of "fine wares" in terra
sigillata were decorated with reliefs that reflected the latest taste, and provided a large group in
society with stylish objects at what was evidently an affordable price. Roman coins were an
important means of propaganda, and have survived in enormous numbers. Other perishable
forms of art have not survived at all.
Of the vast body of Roman painting we now have only a very few pockets of survivals, with many documented
types not surviving at all, or doing so only from the very end of the period. The best known and most important
pocket is the wall paintings from Pompeii, Herculaneum and other sites nearby, which show how residents of a
wealthy seaside resort decorated their walls in the century or so before the fatal eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79

CE. A succession of dated styles have been defined and analysed by modern art historians beginning with August
Mau, showing increasing elaboration and sophistication.