Antique & Vintage Postcards

Against a striking red-and-black ground, a frieze of winged amorini — cherubic cupids — bustle through an ancient apothecary and pharmaceutical workshop: one pounds a mortar, another tends a furnace, a third weighs ingredients at a cabinet-shrine, all recreating the famous fresco sequence from the Casa dei Vettii in Pompeii, the House of the Vettii, whose triclinium walls preserve some of the most joyful and detailed decorative painting to survive from the Roman world. The card reproduces this frieze — Amorini medici farmacisti (cupid physicians and pharmacists) — with a chromolithographic vibrancy that captures the gold, pink, and green of the original fresco against an idealized black background. Published by R&C (Richter & Co., Naples), number 1085/3, this is an early-20th-century Italian art postcard from one of the most prolific publishers of Pompeii archaeological subjects. The reverse is completely unused, with the Italian copyright notice Diritti d'Autore riservati — Riproduzione vietata ai sensi di legge.