The quantity of the paintings, tells us about both the prosperity and the taste of the times. In the early years of exploration, excavators were interested exclusively in the mural paintings, especially those about Greek heroes and famous myths. They were cut out of the walls and transferred to the Naples Archeological Museum. Later, archeologists stopped this practice and serious attention was given to the mural designs as a whole. At the end of the 19 century, August Mau, a German art historian, divided the paintings into four so-called pompeian styles. The technique used in these walls differed considerably from that used in Renaissance frescoes. Before the artist could begin his work, the rough wall had to be covered with three coats of fine lime mortar, followed by other three coats of a mortar using powdered marble. When the wall surface was ready, it was polished with mable dust and the colors laid on at the same time. By doing that, the walls were protected against future cracking and had a brilliant surface like that on marble itself. "The mirror-like glaze over the surface involved not only polishing with marble dust, but also going over the surface with smaller rollers. The whole process, it is clear, was so elaborate and expensive that it was of necessity confined to the paintings in the "best" rooms of the house, the others being much more simply decorated." ( Kraus 156) The First Style (or incrustation). It has also been called the masonry style because the decorator tried to imitate, using stucco relief, the appearance of expensive and costly marble panels. It appeared about 200 B.C., when it became fashionable to paint the inner walls of private houses as well as public and religious buildings. "This decorative mode was of Greek derivation, directly inspired by the isodomic masonry technique, and used polychrome stucco to reproduce the projecting elements such as the dado, the middle zone in large panels, the upper zone in smaller panels, the cornices, and sometimes the pilasters which articulate the walls vertically.
