Abstrakt
Paintings of the villa landscapes form a rather small subgroup of the Roman landscape painting and were largely neglected apart from the works of M. Rostovtzeff in the beginning of the 20th century and G.
Thagaard-Loft in 2010. However, they present an invaluable source of information about villa architecture, the lifestyle connected with it and perception of these two subjects by the Romans themselves, otherwise described by Cicero and Pliny, whose texts they illustrate rather well.
It is almost universally agreed now that the depictions are not "portraits" of existing buildings, yet they are sometimes so detailed that it is possible to roughly reconstruct the imaginary floorplans and compare them with real archaeological situations to see which elements were so important to the Roman perception of villa architecture that they passed through the sieve of the artist's abstraction and on the other hand which real structures did not make it to the paintings. They also demonstrate a new trend in architecture, where the old atrium houses went out of fashion and the luxurious villae became the new models emulated (and in case of lack of wealth just displayed) even in urban contexts.