m.atticus

The Victorians had a perfect nickname for the artist who painted this. They called him a "marbellous" painter, because no one who ever lived could make cold white marble look so real, so sunlit, so touchable, that you feel you could run your hand along it... The artist is Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and his paintings almost feel like a Hollywood vision of ancient Greece and Rome: rather than presenting the classical past as a world of ruins, he imagined it as a place where people actually lived. And when early Hollywood set out to put ancient Rome on screen, its designers found real Rome was a mess of brick and ruin, so they turned to Alma-Tadema instead. His marble became the blueprint for the Roman world in films like Cecil B. DeMille's epics. He quite literally taught the movies how to picture antiquity.