Wall plaster

Twelve fragments of painted wall plaster from a lunette decoration, originally from the bath house of a Roman building excavated from beneath the medieval palace of the Bishop of Winchester. The design on the wall plaster represents two phases of decoration. The first phase was created between AD 120-200 and shows an image of outstanding quality of a collonaded building frontage with garlands and a cupid which is rare in Roman Britain. The second phase is considered to postdate the first by a considerable period and was created sometime in the 3rd century. It shows the central part of a scheme with an unidentified object (possibly a large bowl) suspended by strings within a crude framework of red stripes.

The lunette was from a large building with at least five rooms, three of which had hypocausts (under floor heating) and vaulted ceilings - suggesting these were part of a bath house attached to the building. The wall painting was on the upper part of a clay wall in one of the vaulted rooms.This wall was subsequently replastered and painted. When the building was demolished in the 4th century, the plaster fell face down and the fragments lay undisturbed in a medieval garden until archaeologists discovered them in 1983. For a full discussion about the wall paintings see S.A MacKenna and Roger Ling, 1991, Wall Paintings from the Winchester Palace Site, Southwark in Britannia XXII, pp. 159-171