6. Winged female figure

This panel is made up of fragments and shows a life-size winged female figure in the foreground with her head turned three-quarters to the left in the form of a caryatid, supporting a corbel protruding from an architrave. The figure, adorned with gold jewellery (a necklace with rubies, earrings and a bracelet) holds in both hands a garland of ivy leaves decorated in the centre with a large bow of yellow fabric with purple stripes, which is loosely draped.

The pale flesh tones which are cleverly illuminated, as if to emphasise the statuary nature of the figure, and the soft hues of the wings, contrast with the bright colours of the architectural composition in the background against which the figure is silhouetted. This composition is a square panel surrounded by a border decorated with dolphins and palmettes, below which appears a flight of columns in perspective with a door in between. The iconography of the figure suggests a winged female figure at the House of the Epigrams, probably Season, in the manner of Abundance or Flora (see Moorman 1988, p. 162). It represents a goddess of vegetation, which stylistically and symbolically recalls a winged male figure in a fragment of decoration from the villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, now at the Louvre (see Tran Tam Tinh 1974, pp. 43—46, no. 22).

The exact wall from which the fragment from the first floor of the House of M. Fabius Rufus comes is not known. From comparison with similar paintings it probably belongs to the second decorative style, phase IIb (Beyen), featuring an architectural composition in the central part of the wall with winged female figures in the form of caryatids. The iconography suggests that the lower part of the figure, which is missing, would have been a herm or trailing vegetation.

Winged female figures similar to caryatids are frequent in second style Pompeian painting, for example, in the House of M. Caesius Blandus and in the House of Menander.