Women with Deer

I worked as a Humanities Department archivist at Eastern Michigan University nearly four decades ago. This was in the era before power points or computer assisted classroom instruction, so the work was slow and meticulous. I took photos of art history antiquities from books that were later developed into slides for use in projectors. As I spent hours sweating over a camera beneath hot lights, I began to admire these ancient images. I remember photographing this image in particular. Some years later, I bought this postcard at an art gallery in Petoskey, Michigan.

This postcard is in pristine shape but the actual Roman fresco (nearly 2,000 years old) has cracks and other degradations. The fragment is from the First Century A.D. called Fresco with Woman and Deer. The caption on the back says the fragment is housed in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California. I have not had success locating it among their online archives, though I found another similar fresco with a women and swan here.