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In the course of my association with Frank Brown in the excavation at Cosa, the conversation on many occasions turned to the problems of Roman wall painting, since fragments of mural decoration had been found in various parts of the site, On one of these occasions, as we drove together from Cosa to Rome, Frank interrupted his train of thought concerning the Cosa fragments and said, “Of course, eventually you will have to forget about individual examples and simply explain why Roman walls look the way they do”. As soon as he said this, I knew what he meant, and this essay is my attempt to come to terms with the larger problem. If there is any single distinguishing feature that sets apart the art of the Roman mural, most scholars would probably agree that it has to do with color. Specifically, the problem is to explain how it happens that we are made to feel so strongly the impact of large, two-dimensional fields of color as elements in a three-dimensional pictorial image.