Metope di Paestum

I call this continuous frieze the Metope di Paestum wallpaper, because its surface tells of the Doric order of classical Greek architecture with the same firmness with which the stone has withstood the centuries.

The design reproduces the horizontal band of the Doric frieze: fluted triglyphs, each incised with two deep grooves flanked by two half-grooves, alternate with square metopes carved in low relief with measured figurative motifs, shields and weapons barely suggested. Beneath every triglyph runs a slender regula with six conical guttae, repeated also beneath the mutules that project from the cornice above, while a flat taenia underlines the whole composition. The triglyph-metope-triglyph sequence advances without a break, from one margin of the wall to the other, dense and regular as a musical metre carved in rock.

In the aged limestone and the pale travertine I read the memory of time: the ochres that gather in the hollows, the slight irregularity of the hand-cut guttae, the chisel striations still legible on the metopes. It is an order that does not age but settles, and gives whoever inhabits the space the same quiet a temple gives to those who pass through it.

This is why the Metope di Paestum wallpaper does not look for decoration but for the discipline of form: a rigour that suits any interior, domestic or public, where a single large surface is needed to give measure and breath. WallZad looks after its printing with the same attention once given to the chisel, so that every detail, seen from far or near, stays faithful to the stone that inspired it.