The motif of the enclosed garden (hortus conclusus), a highly refined decorative element distinguished by careful, detailed design, spread through the Roman world starting from the 1 century B.C. The numerous examples found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, while presenting the same compositional scheme, differ from one another in the types of enclosure and in the inclusion of birds and shrubs of various species, of fountains, aedicules and statues. In certain cases the gardens were painted as in a “bird’s eye view”.
Such compositions are, in fact, miniaturized representations of gardens that really existed, as has been verified in the Vesuvian area.
