A cork model in Aschaffenburg (Bavaria) giving new evidence for Pompeii's House of Sallust

The Casa di Sallustio at Pompeii is one of the houses that belongs in every book and study on domestic life and architecture in the Roman era. The fact that it was excavated at the start of the 19th c., however, means that large parts of its decoration have long since been lost through weathering and neglect, a situation further compounded by the damage resulting from Allied bombing in 1943. In order to reconstruct, as accurately as possible, a picture of the house as it stood in antiquity, it is therefore particularly important to evaluate all the historical visual sources that document the house in a better condition. This task has already been extensively carried out in the monograph of A. Laidlaw and M. S. Stella (2014). With a similar goal, I propose to take a fresh look at a cork model dating from 1840 today housed in Aschaffenburg (Bavaria) in order to discuss its context and original function. Next, A. Laidlaw will compare the model's meticulously detailed copies of the structure and decoration, still in 1840 almost perfectly preserved, to the present battered state of the extant remains, thereby confirming the importance of the Aschaffenburg model as the primary archaeological source for the house.