Up From the Ashes
With the Oplontis Project, art history professor John R. Clarke and alumnus Michael L. Thomas teamed up to bring another victim of Vesuvius back to life.
3D model of Oplontis villa dining room in the Second Style
In 1599, workers near Naples, Italy, were constructing an underground canal and accidentally discovered Pompeii. It was formally rediscovered and targeted for excavation in 1748, and ever since, the public has been fascinated by the macabre story of Aug. 24, 79 C.E., and the time capsule that the Vesuvius cataclysm created.
Nowadays, cruise ships dock in Naples, and buses haul tourists to the site by the thousands. To the west, the smaller site of Herculaneum, which suffered the same fate, gets its share of traffic too.
Between the two, another site was discovered in 1964, known because of ancient maps as Oplontis. And one UT professor and his former student are among the world’s foremost experts on this lesser known but hugely important site.
For 21 years, John R. Clarke and Michael L. Thomas have co-directed the Oplontis Project. Clarke joined the UT art history faculty in 1980, and the Annie Laurie Howard Regents Professor of Fine Arts is going strong at 81. Thomas, whose doctoral studies were supervised by Clarke and culminated in 2001, is now a professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he also directs the Edith O’Donnell Institute for Art History.
National Geographic featured the Oplontis Project as part of its cover story “Vesuvius Revisited: A New Story of the Day the World Exploded” in its August 2026 issue. The project involves travel to Oplontis at least once a year for excavation and preservation, but also digging through archival photos taken since the discovery to solve archaeological mysteries, and creating a digital twin that students can use to explore the site.
Between 1980 and 2003, Clarke wrote four books on Pompeii and became an established expert in the field of Roman art. He got special permission to visit Oplontis to study its wall paintings, landscape paintings and mosaics.
In 2005, Thomas, who was working on a postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts University, persuaded Clarke to ask the site director if they could work there together. Clarke was well connected in Pompeii, says Thomas, “and I had experience running field projects. I said, ‘Why don’t we find something and do it together?’ That was the birth of the Oplontis Project.” Clarke raised money from Texas donors, the National Endowment for the Humanities and British sources to fund the study.
We can think of Oplontis as a combination of the Hamptons — vacation homes for the richest of the rich, the senatorial class — and Malibu, mansions on a cliff overlooking the sea, the bay of Naples. “This is the 1% of ancient Italy,” says Thomas. “Make that the 0.5%. So, you’re seeing luxury on an enormous scale.”
There are some 50 opulent villas around the Bay of Naples known from this period. “What did you have a villa for?” Clarke asks. “To entertain your political friends and to plot whatever you were trying to plot, whereas your city house was for the daily business of running your politics, your religion.”
At Oplontis, which sits underneath the modern town of Torre Annunziata, there are two sites under study: One, “Villa A,” is an opulent 40,000-square-foot complex with courtyards and a 60-meter swimming pool. It has no remains except those of an unlucky cow. Villa A boasts a large living area for enslaved servants. The other site, “Villa B,” was a wine-bottling facility where workers washed, dried, recoated and refilled large clay wine jars called amphorae. At Villa B, some 60 people perished.
Clarke describes excavation to his students as a “squashed sandwich.” Digging down, the first thing found were roof tiles, then the upper story with things such as rotted wooden beams and evidence of the floors.
Thomas says they discovered that some of the rooms at Oplontis had suspended ceilings of reed mats with various forms, such as a barrel vault and double barrel vaults, “really complicated feats of engineering.”
But the project also led to a different kind of digging and sleuthing. “John’s expertise had always been painting,” says Thomas, “but at Oplontis he discovered a new passion, the history of excavation.”
One day, which Clarke remembers as “the best day of all,” the archivist at Pompeii said, “I think I have something for you.” It was a big package from the estate of archaeologist Alfonso De Franciscis, who had mistakenly sent it to the German Archaeological Institute in Rome years earlier instead of Pompeii. In that packet were photos of the original excavations from the 1960s. From these photos, Clarke was able to establish important facts about the sequence of the excavation before it had become scientifically systematized in 1972.
Documenting the Site and Digital Exploration
Clarke says, “Full publication has been our obsession. My co-editor, Nayla K. Muntasser (Ph.D. 2003) and I sat in this office for two days every week for six years to edit and create born-digital, first-ever archaeological books (two volumes) on Oplontis.” Available for free as e-books, they cover everything from the ancient setting to details of scientific reports on the paintings to the archaeology of the gardens. Users can query any surface (whether wall, garden, modern trench) to see the relevant database information for that section of the villa.
“The database itself was a necessity because of the sheer amount of data the project produced,” wrote Thomas and Clarke in the introduction to volume 1 of the book. “Our team painstakingly designed the hundreds of categories and subcategories that were needed to house effectively the photographs and information generated by our work. The database contains not only the Oplontis Project notes, photographs, descriptions, and excavation data and reports, but also data belonging to the original excavations of the building that we have painstakingly collected from the Superintendency as well as outside sources.”
The digital twin can be navigated by something resembling a “first-person shooter” game or building game such as Minecraft. Thomas says the goal is to make it open access on the web so people can move around the villa virtually. He is hoping that they will be able to create an app, downloadable to a phone, whereby users can then explore Oplontis on their own.
Student Experience
Students at both universities are deeply involved with the Oplontis Project, especially its digital aspects. Thomas says many of his students are gaming majors at UT Dallas who “come over to do our history and archaeology with me. I get the most joy out of these projects as a facilitator, as someone who makes opportunities for other people.
“I can take a student who three years before had no idea they’d be doing this,” Thomas continues. “They might be business majors. They may be gaming majors. They take a course with us, and next thing you know, they say, ‘Hey, this is really interesting. I want to do this.’ Then they’ll maybe apply to a graduate program. They’ll take a seminar with me. They’ll end up in Italy, and for me, that’s a really rewarding part of it because it’s the ability for these projects to give unrivaled opportunities to students. That’s why we do what we do.”
It’s the ability for these projects to give unrivaled opportunities to students. That’s why we do what we do.
—Michael L. Thomas
Additionally, Thomas says it’s gratifying to see sister universities within the UT System collaborating. “This is one of the great examples of the potential of that collaboration. We are doing important research, and we’re able to do it across two universities in the UT System. It’s not only faculty working together; we also have students coming together and working. It creates a very positive research environment, bringing people together at every level, from students to faculty.”
Discoveries and a Cult of Luxury
The ruins buried by Vesuvius preserve an extraordinary record of changing fashions in wall painting over more than two centuries. Scholars traditionally divide these decorations into four styles, known simply by their ordinals. Because the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E. preserved so many houses and villas, the Bay of Naples provides the richest evidence for their development.
Three of the four styles — the Second, Third and Fourth — are represented at Oplontis.
The First Style, which flourished from about 200 to 80 B.C.E., transformed walls with molded stucco and paint designed to imitate expensive masonry, especially slabs of colored marble. Rather than opening the wall visually, as the later Second Style would do, First Style decoration emphasized its solidity, dividing it into courses of simulated stone blocks and architectural moldings.
The fashion belonged to a larger Hellenistic tradition and allowed homeowners to evoke costly architectural materials through plaster and paint.
At Villa A, however, the owners did use costly stone in an unexpectedly discreet way. Clarke discovered thresholds made of alabaster. “No one would notice unless they were in the know,” he says. “When the light shines on them, they glow.” His eyes still light up when he recounts the discovery.
Around the beginning of the first century B.C.E., the First Style gave way to the Second Style, which peaked between 80 and 20 B.C.E. Instead of modeling walls in stucco to imitate blocks of colored stone, painters increasingly created architecture through paint alone. Columns, doorways, balconies, landscapes and entire buildings seem to open up the solid wall, creating elaborate illusions of space beyond the room. Villa A preserves some of the most spectacular examples of this style.
Around 20 B.C.E., under Augustus, tastes began to change again. The Third Style rejected much of the architectural illusionism of the Second Style and reasserted the flat surface of the wall. Delicate columns, candelabra, ornamental borders and small mythological or landscape paintings appear against broad fields of red, black, white, and other colors. Third Style was closely associated with the sophisticated court culture of Augustus himself.
At the same time, however, the enormous wealth flowing into Rome was transforming elite houses and villas here. Imported marbles and other costly materials became increasingly conspicuous signs of status. So, the history of Roman wall painting runs alongside a larger story of competition among the wealthy — owners continually finding new ways to show off their wealth.
By the middle of the first century C.E., that competition had become still more extravagant. The Fourth Style, which began around 50 C.E. and continued until the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, coincided with what might be called a “marble boom.” Wealthy owners increasingly filled their houses and villas with costly stones brought from across the Mediterranean.
One of the Oplontis Project’s major studies traced the origins of the colored stones used for sculpture, floors, columns and wall revetment. “We have mapped where every single stone in the villas came from,” Clarke says. The results revealed materials imported from quarries throughout the Mediterranean world. Marble, in other words, had become a language of wealth: Its colors and origins proclaimed both the owner’s resources and participation in an empire-wide culture of luxury.
Isotopic studies revealed that building materials at the villas were imported from quarries throughout the Mediterranean world.
By the periods of the Third and Fourth Styles, Clarke says, elite display had become increasingly unapologetic about using stone that was previously considered sacred because it was mostly used in temples. “People just dropped that pretense and said, ‘Look, I’ve got all the money in the world, and I’m going to get a fancier and better villa. And I’ll have five of them, 10 of them, 15 of them.’”
That may seem like a lot of stylistic change for a relatively short span of 200 years. But Thomas says, “You have to think about it in terms of taste: What did a 1980s interior look like as opposed to a midcentury interior? It changes quickly.”
This semester, Clarke is teaching “Love, Beauty and Protection in the Visual Culture of Ancient Greece and Rome” as well as a new course for undergraduate students, “Methods and Theories in Art History.”
In the latter, Oplontis serves as a case study throughout the semester. “It encapsulates everything an art historian and an archaeologist does,” Clarke says. “On the one hand, you have extraordinarily beautiful wall painting, sculpture, objects — the kinds of things that in the old days would have been cut out of the walls and put into museums. But here, they remain in their original setting. On the other hand, we have a much larger question: How did someone live in an ancient Roman villa? We have evidence not only for the elite owners but also for the enslaved persons whose lives and labor sustained the villa.”
At UT Austin, Clarke and colleague Penelope Davies have spent decades building one of the country’s leading programs for the study of Roman art and archaeology, training generations of students to approach the ancient world through both its works of art and the physical settings in which people lived.
