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Thousands of Roman fresco fragments found in London
Archaeologists have discovered thousands of fresco fragments that form one of the largest collections of Roman painted plaster ever found in London. A team from Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) found the fragments while excavating The Liberty site in Southwark, the same place where London’s most intact Roman mausoleum was found in 2023 and one of its largest floor mosaics in 2022.
The frescoes once decorated about 20 internal walls of a Roman building, and when the building was demolished around 200 A.D., the fragments were unceremoniously dumped into a pit, all jumbled together. MOLA’s Senior Building Material Specialist Han Li has been working for months to unjumble these thousands of fragments and put them back in their original positions like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Just like with a puzzle, he groups the pieces by color and pattern and moves them around to recreate the broken design. The fragments are very delicate, with the painted plaster ready to flake just from being handled, so before moving them at all, Li had to be as sure as possible that the pieces would fit.
The largest of the frescoes, measuring about 5m by 3m, has a lower section of pale pink, dotted with specks of paint to imitate marble. Above are rich yellow panels with soft green borders.
The wall paintings are adorned with candelabras, stringed instruments called lyres, white cranes and a delicate daisy. There’s also what appears to be a bunch of grapes, but archaeobotanists believe that this is a plant that grows locally – mistletoe.
“That is actually quite interesting for me, because you’re seeing that the Roman painters are taking a classical idea and they’re very much putting their own North West European, or local, twist on it. I think that’s magnificent,” says Han Li.
The yellow panels over speckled red were imitations of expensive imported stones like Egyptian porphyry (red) and African giallo antico (yellow). This style was popular in high-end villas like at Pompeii or even Colchester, but the yellow panel design in particular is very rarely found in Britian. Only the most opulent Roman homes like Fishbourne Roman Palace had those panels on their walls.
One of the painters even signed his work, although his name has yet to be found. The word “FECIT” meaning “has made this” which would have followed the painter’s name, was found inside a tabula ansata design, a decorative plaque that was used to frame artists’ signatures. This is the first tabula ansata ever found in Britain.
Another unique finding is a graffito of an almost complete Greek alphabet. It’s the only one of its kind in Britain, but other instances of this practice in Italy indicate they were used as a reference guide or tally. The letters were carved by an adept, sure hand, so not by a student practicing his letters by scribbling on a wall.
MOLA researchers believe the demolished building was either a home belonging to a rich family, a hotel meant for wealthy travelers. The neighborhood at the time was a rich suburb of London, not the center of the busy city. Whoever owned it, they were able to attract highly skilled artists with the best materials from the hub of the Roman empire out to London.
“They’ve come to Roman London where there was a building boom, with many houses and many buildings going up that required painting. And they went around essentially taking on huge commissions of work,” said Han Li.
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